Nikolaus Lang
For Mrs. G., estate food and religious hoarder, 1981/82

Artist
Nikolaus Lang

Title
For Mrs. G., Estate Food and Religious Hort

Year of creation
1981/82

Technology and dimensions
glass, wood, paper, sheet metal, 80 x 700 x 700 cm

Year of acquisition
1983

Donation from Gabriele Quandt

Nikolaus Lang is an artist who conceived his work as a "work in progress". He is one of the best-known German representatives of an international art movement that was popular in the 1970s and which is referred to by the criminalistic term "suspense protection". His method of collecting, uncovering and exhibiting relics is always linked to a wide-ranging interest in culture, social change and human living conditions.

“For Mrs. G., Estate Food and Religious Hort” is one of his great early works, with which he received much international recognition. It is a segment from the work about the Götte family. The family moved from Switzerland, from the poor canton of Aargau, more than a century ago to the narrow Bavarian countryside near Oberammergau, which was not exactly open to strangers. She acquired a basic farm away from the town in the middle of meadows. The long-established village community never accepted the family, and so the Götes formed a close family community.

When Nikolaus Lang acquired the basic farm in the late 1960s, he also came across the hut of Mrs. G, who had recently died. She was the last of the siblings to die and lived in the furthest hut, which was not easily accessible. Nikolaus Lang inventoried and secured the entire contents of the barren hut.

By transporting the objects from Ms. G.'s everyday, past life into the museum, Lang arranging them like a "cult place" and placing the spiritual in the middle, the spread out objects also raise questions about our subjective coping with the present. It is an impressive image, the interpretation of which can remain in limbo, should not be fixed and can be reinterpreted for each individual.

Britta Schmitz