Fassbinder

After a fairly turbulent history for a 13-ton work, this sculpture dedicated to Rainer Werner Fassbinder found a new location in 2016. The American sculptor Richard Serra created it in 1983 for the interior courtyard of the Westfälisches Landesmuseum, where it corresponded with a wall piece, “Fassbinder II.” Serra specifically conceived the work for an interior courtyard, where it was intended to represent the fractious character of the eponymous filmmaker: The sculpture does not adapt to the space, it occupies and absorbs it, giving it a specific character and redefining it. Due to these conceptual reasons, the artist was not convinced by the site in front of the building proposed as part of the museum reconstruction. When the museum was renovated, the sculpture therefore went into storage at first, until it was given an ideal site in the interior courtyard of the university museums, which was also redesigned. The new site is surrounded by the high buildings of the English Department, the Geomuseum and the Bible Museum. The viewer who enters the courtyard through a low archway does not expect to encounter the massive, slightly asymmetrical construction of the three five-metre-high steel walls which are combined in a U-shape placed diagonally into the courtyard. Possible overhead views from the windows of the buildings and a connection to the neighbouring courtyard of the Geomuseum with Siah Armajani’s “Study Garden” (1987), however, also allow for a different context of the sculpture which, moreover, remains in spatial proximity to its counterpart preserved in the Landesmuseum.

http://www.lwl.org