Dec 7, 2024 – Feb 23, 2025
Philipp Simon
Nürnberg (Nuremberg), 2019
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Nürnberg, 2019
Mixed media
Dimensions variable
Ongoing series, with certificate1.200 €
In Philipp Simon’s works, which encompass the medium of drawing as well as its sculptural arrangement in space, mental and public states fold into one another. By deliberately connecting such carefully kept separated poles as rational understanding and irrational feeling, Simon’s works dismantle the stable systems with which we try to cope with a day, a month, a life. Radiating from Nürnberg (Nuremberg) (2019) is a contemporary interpretation of German Romanticism that atmospherically sets the scene. The light emanating from the delicate, orange-tinted glass transports us mentally into the dimmed semi-darkness of a warm tavern, where it smells of gravy and the malty sweetness of freshly tapped beer. Originally created as part of an exhibition in Nuremberg, a city whose architectural surfaces exude a “constant state of pre-Christmas anticipation,” Simon’s work transforms the rooms of the Kunstverein into a kind of hallucinatory fever dream. Familiar, yet also a tad implausible, it acts as a filter over our perception of the rest of the day. The industrial cable, loosely attached to the lamp and extensively routed, may show us the way out.