In his recent exhibition “Lunarium,” Daniel Knorr presented works (all 2014, although some belong to series begun earlier) that translate various readings of urban space into the gallery sphere. The series “Berlin Wall,” 2014–, and “Depression Elevation,” 2013–, might be described as transformations of metropolitan action scenes into imagery and objects. In “Block,” 2009–, and Lunarium (the latter is the first and so far only work in a new eponymous series begun this year), Knorr experiments with performative theatrics that involve viewers in the process of visualization.

Lunarium was set up in a small store next door to the gallery that faces a narrow and not very busy side street. Its facade and windowless interior were covered with black duvetyn, a light-absorbing fabric. Outside, black letters advertised a LUNARIUM, suggesting, perhaps, the nocturnal counterpart of a solarium or tanning salon. In any case, the name implies pallor, an absence of light, the diffusion of contours into shadowy indistinction. What Knorr offered here was a space unencumbered by any definite purpose, as emphasized by the hours of operation: The site was accessible four nights a week from midnight to 5 AM. At night, the installation looked like a blank, a rectangular gap cut into the row of buildings. The half-open door, which seemed to lead nowhere, appeared sinister but also held a strangely magical appeal. Yet Knorr’s project was not designed to dazzle: He intended it as a place of undefined chance encounters beyond the confines of workaday consciousness. A few art flaneurs came, but the project was primarily animated by chance passersby. Knorr himself was on-site nightly for the full six weeks the installation was on display. There was no script, no performance, strictly speaking—only a lightless and empty place in the deep, dark night and the opportunity to talk to the artist. So it was primarily the visitors’ responses to the work that determined its qualities. But Lunarium couldn’t help but evoke the romantic tradition in which the night is a realm of intensified imagination, accommodating dreamlike flights of fancy as well as uncanny and repressed impulses. It is probably not entirely coincidental that the artist premiered this “nocturne” in Vienna, the city of Sigmund Freud.

The rest of the exhibition, on view in the gallery during the day, included irregularly shaped and in some cases luminously colorful wall reliefs from the “Depression Elevation” series. These are transparent polyurethane casts, most of them variously saturated with different hues. The viewer faces the level side so that the uneven obverse side appears as a specific visual structure in depth. The works look completely abstract, but they are the products of a concrete investigative process: Strolling through Vienna, Knorr noticed potholes and places where the pavement had subsided or been dented—unprepossessing phenomena, but the vestiges of years, even decades, of use. The artist took casts of selected shapes and then manufactured synthetic-resin replicas. Subtitles like Wien, Augarten or Wien, Stephansplatz record the site where each cast was taken, making the work a sort of urban archaeology project. In Block, musical instruments—a cello, a timpani, a violin, a flute, a double bass, and a harp—are arrayed inside a cage; visitors are free to look at them from outside or to make music after allowing themselves to be locked in. People wanting to play the instruments become exhibits in their own right in a cage that shelters them, but also sets them apart and puts them on display.

—Jens Asthoff

Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.