Gönül Sen-Menzel: Wallpaper Sample Books at the 4th KölnKunst

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“Pamper yourself,” visitors are told right behind the entrance to the Kunsthalle.

If a visitor steps into Gunter Demnig’s colorful machine, bends forward, inserts a mark coin or turns a wheel himself (or has it turned), his backside is given a thorough working over by four leather whips. Between pain and pleasure – an allusion to the 4th KölnKunst, which the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Cologne (BBK) presents here from today?

First, the pain: of course every visitor will miss one or another artist. But how could injustices be avoided when about 700 of the roughly 2,000 artists living in Cologne applied, of whom 137 were finally selected? It is certainly annoying that the “New Media” section has to be canceled. It literally fell into the water, because in the Stapelhaus, which was intended for it, the Rhine stood almost two meters high. A firm promise has been made to make up for this show.

Overall – and this is where the pleasure begins – the exhibition is hung very generously. 120 artists are presented here with paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. One has to credit the jury – consisting of Dieter Horky, BBK chairman; Renate Lewandowsky, last dean of the College of Art and Design; Evelyn Weiss, Museum Ludwig; Winfried Gellner, Cologne Cultural Office; and Klaus Honnef, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn – with courage in its selection: 80 of those chosen had never been represented at a KölnKunst before. Even if many “big” names are missing again, the exhibition provides a high-quality overview of what is currently happening in the Cologne scene. And Tremezza von Brentano, Charly Banana or Karl Marx are not bad figureheads either.

A High Proportion of Women

The large proportion of women (53 female artists) is gratifying. So too are the many foreign artists on show: the best proof that Cologne is a good place for exchange across national borders. KölnKunst is also a forum for those artists who regularly have exhibitions but are not seen very often in Cologne itself.

Cestmir Janosek, for example, shows his very latest “Giffragen”, an icing technique he invented decades ago. Marlini Wickramasinha’s painterly treatments of press photos are becoming ever stricter and more concentrated, as are Reinhard Henning’s bizarre, bitterly wicked object collages. It is difficult to identify trends. The urge toward installation probably still exists, but slightly weakened. Painting in every style, on the other hand, seems to be gaining weight again.

Some like it colorful, like Hasam Al-Basam with his oriental colors; others prefer monochrome, like Peter Christmann or Bettina Dannhauer. Attractive is the juxtaposition of Rosa-M. Heßling’s pink-blue vertical stripes and Friederike van Duiven’s blue, green and brown horizontally layered linocuts. Helga Weihs’s sculpture of light and dark layered wood dominates the room as much as Koken Nomura’s “Color Sound Column” of cheerful colorful “throwaway paper”.

Matthias Beckmann’s fine pencil drawings are more subtle. Michael Schmücker follows in the footsteps of the Australian Aborigines with his painted pieces of wood. The “dangerously closed society” of the Unterbezirks-Dada is wickedly witty: the quartet in black suits has crawled up under the ceiling of the hall. In Gönül Sen’s expressively embellished wallpaper sample books, visitors are even allowed to leaf through the pages.

Kunsthalle, until March 19, 1995, daily 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Tue and Fri 10 a.m.–8 p.m., closed Mondays, catalog 30 marks.