MAKE UP WAKE UP – new facades for Neumünster

On the exhibition concept (excerpt from the opening speech by Philipp Röhe Hansen Schlichting)

Ceramics and architecture are closely linked historically. Ceramic elements such as cornices, pilasters and pilasters serve to structure façades and wall surfaces, but glazed facing bricks such as tiles, moulded bricks or nose stones also make a decisive contribution to the appearance of a house. Of course, we feel free to add new creations of all kinds to these “classical” elements and to fuse them with graphic and painterly means into new total works of art as we see fit. We are expressly looking forward to this new format of collaboration and to developing new hybrid formats between façade painting and ceramics.

The Keramikkünstlerhaus is known for its well-established international Art in Residency programme and with this step we at Polychrom also want to expand the exchange with artists in order to invite them to Neumünster for joint projects in the future.

We have deliberately conceived the exhibition format as a design exhibition. All the designs you see here have been made explicitly for this exhibition and relate to the Vicelinviertel here in Neumünster.
As you may have already recognised, there are three façade types, one of which appears several times. These three types of façades are idealised façades from the Vicelinviertel, they are each an average type of real existing façades of the same type of construction, which we created and provided as a basis for the design. The artists were free to choose which type of façade they wanted to work on.

From an artistic perspective, we have to deal with a special challenge when designing a façade. Where artists can usually create freely from the “tabula rasa” or “horror vacui”, dealing with a façade is a much different case.

One has to deal to a much greater extent with a given, the specifications of the architectural structure and the building as well as the surroundings and the people who live there. A circumstance that operates much closer to everyday life than the ideal-typical constitution of free image and body worlds. In the following and concluding sentences, I would like to briefly describe the range of the exhibited designs precisely at this moment of dealing with and reacting to what is there – essentially here formally related to the façade structure and its articulation.

In one design, the geometry of the façade itself is questioned very thoroughly and analytically in order to then add a new, self-reflective level to it in well-proportioned and reflective ceramic elements.

Several designs react very concretely to the triangular gable form and thus also take up a formative architectural element, in order to then develop it further into a painterly structural form of their own: This time very clearly oriented to the architectural structure, another time by means of the diagonals clearly transverse and more freely held to the façade. In this way, parallel picture planes to the façade are created, independent forms and colour schemes are introduced, already established styles are incorporated, formulate and rewrite the outer shell of the building.

In the most radical version, the façade itself finally becomes a pure image carrier for a different scenery, traces of memory from the city’s history, memories are moved into the present and thus firmly re-established in the everyday cityscape.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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