From the City to the Kitchen and back

Since the pandemic, your life has tended to take place in Berlin. But you actually commute between Berlin and New York, both incredibly large and diverse cities. What is special and inspiring about each of them for you?

The pandemic has led to a spatial expansion of my work. Unlike before the pandemic, I now have two studios: in New York and in Berlin. In the current phase, I need the tension that already arises from the externally palpable contrasts of the cities. A gray, high-rise peninsula - Manhattan - and a tough, runny pancake - Berlin.

My first exhibitions in New York - that was in 2011 - took place in kitchens and living rooms. The kitchens were my studios and that's where I created my first sculptures. In New York, kitchens aren't used much anyway. People don't meet at home, but on the street or in cafés. Despite the pandemic, the streets of Manhattan were important places for socializing. At openings, people stand on the street and chat, at sample sales, fashionistas wind their way around several blocks. The block parties in summer are particularly special - that's when the thirst for knowledge of those interested in art sweeps me away. Which exhibition is worth seeing, what are the latest rumors in the art scene, which artist is exhibiting where. This compression of interest and dialog is unique for me in New York. My second studio, in Berlin - located in the middle of the green Tiergarten, by the way - sometimes comes in handy for me to concentrate on working on new ideas.

The topics of urban planning and urban space in general play a major role in your work. What interests you about this?

I am very interested in architecture, the urban design of the street, the so-called public spaces. Behind this is the question of how they came about, grew or were built. What are the functional interrelationships, what is added, what is or was demolished. In New York, it's much more of a permanent cycle of creative destruction than elsewhere. Monument protection carries much less weight than the need for the constant shedding of the city, whose elixir is its change.

New York is the original stimulus for this passion. In Berlin, I am primarily concerned with the historiography of modernism and design. In my latest sculptures, I have taken up this history and retold it. It's a new interpretation of a lived and gendered experience.

The work “City Lights - Dead Horse Bay”, which is part of the Stadler Collection, also deals with the theme of the city. Could you describe it in more detail?

“City Lights - Dead Horse Bay” is part of a body of work that deals with the creative destruction that the urban planner Robert Moses inflicted on New York in the mid-20th century. For many people and the environment, this was very formative. By superimposing a miniature cityscape on a pedestal that resembles a horse's head, I allude to the ghostly past of Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. Fertilizer was made from animal carcasses there. During the construction of the Park Marine Highway bridge and other important roads, Moses used this landfill. The rubble from the buildings that lay in the path of the gigantic transportation projects was dumped here. And also, a lot of personal belongings that those displaced from their communities had to leave behind.

The urban landscape with architectural elements of Manhattan also includes my studio and miniatures of my sculptures, which function as a dense and three-dimensional self-portrait. In addition, the horsehead-shaped island is filled with architectural "utopias" from various periods, including a surrealist Mexican garden called Las Pozas and the fantastical Sacro Bosco, built in northern Italy in the 16th century. The miniaturization and recreation of these monomaniacal visions gives an idea of how powerful individuals - often men - radically shape the landscape and massively effect the lives and livelihoods of many people.