Vitres
Vitrine Rathaus Tiergarten, Berlin
01.06. - 30.06.2021

Exhibited work:
Vitres en Vitrine, 2021

Text:
Andreas Prinzing

In the all-around glazed showcase in front of Tiergarten City Hall, Sunah Choi presents "Vitres," a site-specific work. While objects and surfaces of everyday urban life have always been an important source of reference, this is an installation created for urban space. The artist takes up the structure and materials of the presentation context of showcases - frames and windows, metal and glass - and transforms them. Monochrome painted panes of different sizes lean against steel frames, whose reduced form is reminiscent of a basic architectural structure. Far away, the grids of Minimal Art reverberate, but their rectangular rigour is broken up. Choi has applied stained glass colors to the panes with rhythmic brushstrokes: Lemon, Deep Blue, Chartreuse, and nine other tones.
Daylight forms a central component of the fragile work, which refers as much to church windows as to the light experiments of the Bauhaus. When the sun appears, the semi-transparent panes glow with vibrating colors, shadows and reflections overlap, and spatial classifications become blurred. A polyphonic, iridescent color space emerges. In the center of Moabit, the artist opposes the dominant representative building of the town hall, which was built during the Nazi era, with an installation that is characterized by a playful, poetic moment. With precision, Sunah Choi creates an imprecise space that unites opposites such as static and dynamic, materiality and immateriality, planning and chance. And whose elements, in interaction with the surroundings, result in something unforeseen - a luminous in-between that is continuously changing.
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