“Deutsche Wandstücke”

Practiced by Giotto, Raphael, and Michelangelo but not many artists since, fresco painting is brought to a new life in this exhibition through the interventions of seven German artists invited to work on-site. The show offers a fascinating opportunity to watch a group of fairly popular European painters integrate an outdated medium with their own visual language and balance tradition and innovation. Furthermore, the town of Bolzano is home to a significant German-speaking population and rich with exemplary frescos throughout its churches and streets. In Feuchtraum (Humid Room; all works 2006), Gregor Schneider openly engages this local tradition by replicating some of these older examples and depicting a crumbling Madonna with a golden aureole, as a contemporary icon pointing to a spiritual past. Ulla von Brandenburg’s black figures move on a fictional stage like characters in an imaginary play. Matthias Weischer’s domestic interior draws the viewer into a familiar yet bewildering site. In Parkhotel, Norbert Schwontkowski roams the surfaces of the room, breaking apart the picture plane by sketching isolated fragments of a dreamlike city in which mysterious objects such as a street lamp, a disco ball, a hotel sign, and a pair of legs walking along a sidewalk animate the white walls. In the most successful works, the imaginative reuse of an obsolete technique opens new windows onto our remote fantasies and joyful dreams.