GALERIE BARBARA THUMM The boundaries between private and public space are fluid.

GALERIE BARBARA THUMM

The boundaries between private and public space are fluid. Shopping malls, administrative buildings, and command service centers are becoming festivalized places with attached restaurants, movies, and round-the-clock bars, while the actual work done there look afters to vanish into the buildings' upper floors or side wings. reciprocally private living space is becoming increasingly officelike, thanks to telecommuting.

For Sabine Hornig, these ambiguously differentiated places in society are symbolized from building entrances. The two model-like plastic arts shown here were based onward different doorways. Her sculptures archetype the structure of a building vital air without imposing any special artistic signature. through covering the objects with a layer of plaster she merely emphasizes their formal indifference. Plattenbau (Bosna), 2000 is an exact duplicate of an entrance to a government-planned high-rise apartment stiffen that had been built using prefabricated panels. Reduc in scale by dint of a third, the entryway becomes a tangible end that corresponds in size to the visitor's carcass Rauhputz Forest, 2000, on the other hand, is a shrill golden facade with a door spackled close up and an open window area with a "view"--in reality a photograph of a forest landscape. Here the construct agained space is a display, a link between architecture and artificially suited nature-emphasized by the use of a pixelized version of the photograph.

In one as well as the other constructions a certain skepticism is evident toward the claim that modernist architecture aids function over fashion. Even the pre-fab panels flow across as ornamental. For Hornig the banality of these buildings with their anonymous, unspectacular form appears to be a artifice In Plattenbau (Bosna), it is precisely the isolation of the entrance from the intermission of the building that reveals what a bizarre collection of intensitys and corners it really is-a cacophony of architectural maneuvers. by the agency of exact reconstruction she makes its inconsistencies apparent. Its complicated walls fitting and interlock at a worthy dozen angles. The pure cubical building technique dovetails in more and more corners, as if plane the constructions of state planning were strewn with ornaments. Reducing architecture to detail, Hornig offer proffers a parallel between the geometry of minimal art and the isolated forms of the various simple bodys in an architectonic ensemble; alienated from their original architectural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following these elem ents can be seen as fittings interlaid between public and private realms.

This play with the forms of building assurances comes up again in a diptych from the photo series "11080" The photos, taken from different distances, point out to the entrance to a garage in looks Angeles. In one the garage door marks a drastic carve dividing the facade into surface and space. In the next to the first the entrance remains a dark pit framed by the facade. The perspectives overlap, nevertheless because of the displaced viewpoint the pictured spaces appear entirely disparate. Here the contrast of surface, facade, and space becomes apparent: The entrance as an abstract surface visually divides what it unites in real space. The passage between outside and inside stands for any boundary between spaces.

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