_ Salle des Pères | Ulrike Grossarth

Salle des Pères

Berlin 2005/ 2006

The point of departure is the work Salle Blanche by Marcel Broodthaers. It shows the reconstruction of a part of his flat in Brussels in which the artist set up his “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section 19ième siècle” in 1968. The reconstruction was created in 1975, shortly after the artist’s residency at the DAAD in Berlin. I chose it as a room for meditation in which I could reconsider my path in fine art.

As the conclusion of a passage through the art-historical heritage of a line determining my work, from Duchamps via Magritte to Broodthaers, I had the architectural shell of the Salle Blanche reconstructed again, with a few deviations, to set up the ‘Museum of Fathers’ in it. I would like to respond to Broodthaers textual lining of the Salle Blanche with terms from painting with tools from the volumes on drawing of the Encyclopédie Diderot & d'Alembert. They are to make the bodies and the material condensations that can be treated by them ‘appear’, i.e. the analytical tools immediately evoke the next media, even if still in an invisible state. Oversize shadows of kings from the allegorical canon of the 16th century by Cesare Ripa on the walls, as well as two reliefs of the heads of Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte at the place where Broodthaers had hung the stucco lions, round off the theme. One can also walk through the salle des pères and thus experience it physically.