Tara

Three artists from Hamburg show a spectacular exhibition with truck tarpaulins in the Kunstwerk

Deutz / Mülheim – How many trucks fit into the exhibition hall of the artwork? Hinrich Gross, Eva Riekehof und Jörn Zehe have brought no fewer than seven trucks of different sizes into the space on the charmingly morbid KHD site for their current exhibition – but without vehicles or cargo. Only the tarpaulins hang from the ceiling on strings like giant tents, simulating a three-lane highway full of trucks in the exhibition space.

Only little space remains for the visitors. The proximity to the road monstrosities makes the individual small and leads to a material experience of dirt and plastic smell that could not be more intense. “Tara” is what the three Hamburg artists from Künstlerhaus Frise call this massive production. Tara, that is the weight that remains when the net weight is subtracted from the gross weight: the packaging weight, the shell that is sent for recycling. “That which usually eludes personal utilization, the disposal, so to speak,” explain Gross, Riekehof and Zehe, who have put aside their individual artistic approaches in favor of a collaborative project.

The “Tara” that seems a trifle in a tin can or cellophane wrapper becomes a gigantic size with considerable sensual-painterly presence on the scale of truck tarps. The tarps create spaces in space that are protective and threatening in equal measure. Both painterly-sculptural and symbolic discoveries can be made in the faded, weather-tanned colors, lettering, and emblems of Europeanized commodity flows. The way the three artists have fundamentally transformed the exhibition hall has impressed the audience and the artists of the artwork at the opening. “A fantastic project,” says Kunstwerk co-organizer Ulrich Eichhorn (…)

By Jürgen Kisters, 09/08/2005