Installations

- Positions
- Schwärmerei
- Food Design
- Typical Switzerland
- Shared Memories
- Cars

Positions A metaphor for the world of figures

In order to create their work for ING at Art Brussels, the Swiss artist duo Beat Klein (1956) and Hendrikje Kühne (1962) suspended exactly 826 small paper airplanes, delicately floating in the air covering the entire ceiling of 250 m? at a height of 3.50 m above the visitors' heads.
The ceiling is completely covered by these airplanes, meticulously positioned by the artists at an equal distance of 50 cm from one another. Every 50 cm?, visitors can see four paper airplanes – one in each corner – folded differently, but above all created using financial transaction statements from ING Belgium's arbitrage room.
Visitors are transported by this subtle fairylike vision of a multitude of airplanes floating horizontally in the air like gliders on hold, transforming the space into a fascinating location.

Installation: Art Brussels 2011, detail of invitation card

Schwärmerei

Schwärmerei (German lit. going of in swarms, as bees under their queen), name given to an intense enthusiasm for other people or things with which people are affected. Also means excessive emotion.

Travel brochure images on board, Blu-Tack.

Installation view: Cafe Gallery Projects, London, 2005, curated by K3 Zurich and mother's tankstation, Dublin, 2007

Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein are collectors, detectives and artists. In their show Food Design at the gallery Staub (g*fzk!), they present 93 mini-sculptures made from food reproductions glued on cardboard. The artists-collectors assembled the pictures for these 3-dimensional collages from the flood of food advertisments. Using a special technique, they created spatial constructions reminiscent of carnivorous plants and of models of atomic structures. The objects are grotesque, absurd and funny. A " La Vache qui rit"- cheese is balancing on top of a piece of ham which itself is resting on a lump of mould-ripened Gorgonzola, from which in turn corncobs and chilies are proliferating. In another piece a fruit flan and a whole cohort of pizzas are placed on a very unstable looking foundation of potatoes and celery stalks. These biomorphic combinations hardly evoke the desires originally intended by the food reproductions. The individual elements have lost their function as represenatives of food. " Ceci n'est pas une pipe" or in the Cockaigne-nightmare-land of Kühne/Klein: art won't make you fat.

Food Design, 2004, 93 objects, advertisment pictures on board

Portrait by Dr. Simon Bauer in Kunst-Bulletin 6/2004

Typical Switzerland

2002, floor sclupture, pictures from travel brochures on board
300 x 400 x 25 cm, installation view Kunstmuseum Olten, 2004

Essay by Dr. Sabine Gebhardt Fink

Shared Memories

For "Shared Memories" we have mounted transparent landscapes on a glass front. Three thousand slides, privat memories and travel reminiscences borrowed from friends were arranged in a pattern. The only light in the room slides through the pictures, illuminates them and deletes all individual features and individual traits. The single picture becomes a mosaic stone of a greater context.

Shared Memories
2 x (260cm x 160cm), installation with 3000 slides, 1999

Cars

The advertised car forms the smallest unit of the sculpture "Cars". The pictures, cut out from from newspapers, magazines and other advertising literature were mounted on board and assembled in a rectangular system. As our sights were set on representing each of the 58.847 registered cars in the canton of Basel-Stadt on August 31. 1999 by an image, we asked friends and relatives to help us collect the required car pictures. It was the collectors perception and enthusiasm that widely determined the size, colour and shape of the sculpture, although the goal of 58.847 pictures was clearly missed. There are two sides to the sculpture. On the one hand, there is the colourful side with the glossy pictures and the deceptive perspective, on the other hand there is a negative side, forming a grey accumulation of seemingly amorphous shapes. It is only by change of the point of view, that the overall picture reveals itself, yet it can never be perceived as a whole.

"Cars"
floor sculpture, paper on card, 1999

Catalogue
Catalogue of the exhibition in the Kunst Raum Riehen, 24 p., english/german, 6 colour and 16 black and white photographs, texts by Kiki Seiler, Riehen and Raymund Ryan, Dublin

Review by Samuel Herzog in Kunst-Bulletin 10/1999