“Fragility can be a very beautiful thing, more beautiful than something that is obviously made to last forever,” Genzken has said about her fascination with ruins. Painting belongs to a series of freestanding concrete sculptures on high steel pedestals that Genzken began making in the late 1980s. The work resembles a building fragment, a motif reflecting her upbringing in a Germany devastated by war. It also commemorates the Berlin Wall, whose demolition, in 1989, changed Germany’s ideological landscape as well as its physical one.
Gallery label from 2020
