Introduction

Esther Schipper is pleased to present h = 400 cm, the first solo exhibition of Karin Sander at the gallery. 

Sander reworks the space with three reciprocal interventions. Encountering the freshly remodeled exhibition space, her reaction is radical: she transforms it to its previous state. This is not an act of restoration, but can be seen as an analytical gesture. The revision of a particular order to which the gallery space was subjected allows the viewer to experience its ephemerality. Sander excises the vertical plane and brings it into a horizontal position, thereby making the felled walls into transitional objects that fester communication between floor, ceiling and the other walls.

In the second room Berliner Zimmer is presented. The work is a piled carpet made based on an existing architectural drawing of a room in the exhibition space of Esther Schipper. The off-white ground shows height information and standardized indications for electrical outlets in red and the location of ceiling stucco in broken black lines. The work not only exactly reproduces the architectural drawing, but it does so true to the room’s scale, encouraging the viewer to explore the space to find the properties shown on the plan. Paradoxically, the floor piece draws attention to the ceiling, showing the outlines of its ornamentation.

The divergence between a plan and the experience of the actual space it is meant to represent draws our attention to different effects of communicating spatial information. The theme is also explored in the artist’s Source Code piece for this show, which give information about the volume of the rooms in which they were hung in XML-SVG computer code.