Schichtung / Layering

More than forty sculptures by important artists can be found in the park which emerged from the 1929 Große Ruhrländische Gartenbau-Ausstellung (Great Ruhrland Horticultural Exhibition). “Schichtung” by Thomas Lenz, an artist close to the Op Art Movement, is one of the few entirely abstract works here, one that focuses on the visual perception of space and surface. Identical flat steel squares with rounded corners are stacked up so that the shifts between them create a large square set on its tip. While all squares are steel-grey, the only completely visible square is painted a bright pink, marking the basic form from which the sculpture was made. Were it not clear that the sculpture was created in 1970, well before computers and the internet became ubiquitous, one would think of a “copy and paste” process on a screen. This process of formal repetition gives the sculpture a visual spatial depth that far exceeds its haptic depth, which is actually only about one metre.