Des Wahnsinns schöne Kinder at PiK Deutz Cologne
Des Wahnsinns schöne Kinder at PiK Deutz Cologne
The floor work Des Wahnsinns schöne Kinder (Madness‘ Beautiful Children), shows a group of figures consisting of 9 demonic beings pulling and tugging at a cloth with the red inscription EGO. The three meter wide scene forms a pattern that covers the 300-square-meter f!oor of PiK Deutz in Cologne. In terms of composition and drawing, the pictorial element borrows from Martin Schongauer‘s copperplate engraving ‚St. Anthony, Plagued by Demons‘ from 1470. Like the man, centrally placed in the Christian depiction, the cloth cannot defend or protect itself and at the same time is depicted unharmed in iconographic transfiguration. This tension highlights the structures and aesthetics of power embedded in political ideologies that are at the core of Czebatul‘s work. A collective ego occupies space and is, as it were, besieged, tormented, compromised, not least by developments in the current social and pandemic crisis. The Christian fundamental value systems thematized by taking up the engraving also offer an analogy to the world gone of the rails, creating a globe-spanning macro-perspective. The rosette‘s rhythmic repetition, arrangement, and rotation on its own axis extends the exhibition hall outward, exploding spatial limitations and expanding it metaphorically. The other works in the exhibition are inf!uenced by the expansive floor work and besiege and occupy the carpet.