Wir überwinden Grenzen

Klaus Merkel received the Kurt Lehmann Foundation and Sparkasse Staufen-Breisach Prize on March 15, 2006. Exhibition in the customer hall of the Staufen branch, Münstertäler Straße 2 (March 16 to May 20, 2006).

Klaus Merkel reproduces his own works in an idiosyncratic aesthetic context. He designs them as miniatures and assembles them into an ornamental pattern, as if he wanted to create a scale of experience of his work and thus a catalog of his artistic means.

Each miniature leaves behind a trace of memory. The complex picture, however, points programmatically in a new artistic direction: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Klaus Merkel: "For me, pictures are always both: unique settings and at the same time material that I can continue to use. In the meantime, I am quite certain that by insisting on imitation in my own work, i.e. the repetition of individual motifs, I have acquired a general model of disposal for pictures. This is a renunciation of invention, i.e. loss. I want the programmed loss in my work to be a simple 'means'."