Image credits: Heidi Holleis // Nadja Ayoub // “Urban spricht Kunst”, 2013, exhibition series on the subject of landscape space: ideas for the symbiosis between urbanity, art and nature, Innsbruck, Austria
Great piece of turf
The title of the work refers to a 1503 watercolour painting with opaque colours on paper by Albrecht Dürer. Because of the emphasis laid on a banal piece of lawn, this realisation is regarded radical and ranked as the first modern landscape painting.
In her contribution to “Urban spricht Kunst”, Heidi Holleis deals with the framing of a detail of nature. In the exhibition area, a sole glass top is placed on a piece of turf.
The area with its organic underground is subject to a strong process of change: the shape and colour of the turf are “naturally” going to change during the exhibition. The glass top accelerates this process of metamorphosis that is part of Holleis’ concept. With her idea Holleis shows that the found landscape with its characteristics suffices and that an idyllic-aesthetic apotheosis contradicts her artistic practice.
(Nadja Ayoub, translated by Maria Magdalena Larch)