Demolition Paintings
With the Berlin „Demolition Paintings“, Irma Markulin refers to mosaiques and wall paintings that were attached to nursery schools in Berlin Marzahn. The four paintings are meant to be shown as an installation in form of a 2 by 2 meters cube, in which the actual paintings perform like the outside walls of an architectural object, while the inner part is left empty. The cube reminds in its reduced geometrical form slightly of late GDR architecture that is typical for the large suburban estate housing districts like Marzahn and the nursery schools implemented into them.
In a converse process of creation, the „Demolition Paintings“ simulate through the interaction of the mosaiques and the architecture bearing them a mobile archive of these vanished traces of GDR publically commissioned art in urban space.
The Paintings motives are taken from the existing documentation by the city district and range from so to say exemplary figurative depictations of aspects of everyday life in the former GDR to abstract minimalist painting. These, in their aesthetics sometimes disputable, mosaiques pursuit for the most part propaganda purposes and have in their voyeuristic application as wallworks the same duty as ideologic paroles, who were also implemented into the architecture of the large suburban estate housing district of Marzahn.
Last but not least, these Wallworks are the expression of the political- ideological project of „Kunst am Bau“ (art integrated into architecture), that was pursued by the political system of the GDR. After the fall of the wall, these Wallworks became a lively testimony of the past, until they were destroyed due to urban reconstruction efforts. They were, nonetheless, an in itself highly complex form of art integrated into large scale architectural developments.
Translation Philpp Koch
work process, projection of arhiv material 2012, studio at Petersburger Platz
work process 2012, studio at Petersburger Platz