Heike Weber is a master of the filigree, but one who does not lose sight of the monumental.
Several years ago she organized a large configuration out of hairnets, which in form and compressed,
layered consistency recalled a cumulus cloud. From this occupation with an amorphous shape, two paths
were possible. Heike Weber took both of them.
At the end of one of the paths beckoned a figurative duplication of impressions from the real world
or from a familiarity with artworks. The other destination was marked by a cool, serially oriented
abstraction with a strong tendency to a fascinating, ornamental allover. The decision to take both
paths led, on the one hand, to poetically dreamy, yet room-filling wall ‘drawings’ via a clothesline
mounted on pins, on the other, to both ornamental and extensively spread constellations anamorphous
to the floor.
If Heike Weber, now for Museum Morsbroich, has realized a large-scale floor drawing with the title
barocco, this can be understood as a tertium quid, namely a structure that mediates between figuration
and abstraction, but is at the same time quite autonomous and heads in a new direction. “The drawing
consists of cutout carpeting. This tangled web-like drawing will enter a dialogue with the architecture
and, above all, the tiled floor”, the artist explains and continues: “The work ‘inhabits’ a place between
functional object, drawing, ornament and sculpture that defines the room.” In his novel The Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has his protagonist Steven Dedalus formulate a theory that art
is man’s own arrangement of sensitive or intelligible matter directed towards an aesthetic end. In this
sense what Heike Weber forms is art, an art that starts out from a single element and spans the room.
Many were the participants responsible for realizing this complex installation of spatial drawing,
to whom we owe our gratitude. Our warmest thanks goes to Heike Weber and her team, who have pushed
this project forward with as much agility as scrupulous care in the details. Thanks also is due to
the authors of the catalogue: Martin Engler and Thomas August Gmeinder.
We are deeply grateful to the NRW State Ministry for City Planning, Culture and Sport, which has made
this project possible and to Bayer Ltd as well as Vorwerk Co. for their generous support.