Any image, fading (CMYK)
2010Colored film on glass4 areas, each approx. 247 x 45 cmThe Ricola Collection includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, photographs, and electronic art (video). In addition to these autonomous works, which are exhibited for limited periods at changing sites, there are also a few works that fall into the category of “art in public places.” They are works conceived for a specific place. They include the drawings on the doors of the production facilities in Laufen, which were produced by the boycotlettes, an artist collective from Basel (Melanie Fischer and Lara Schwander), and the design of a conference room in the marketing building in Laufen by the artist Rosemarie Trockel.
In 2010 another project was realized: 'Any Image, Fading (CMYK)' by Dagmar Heppner (b. 1977; lives in Zurich and Berlin).
The Brief
The interior design of the Volksfreund building is composed largely of glass walls. In the open central area, there is a cafeteria and a services room with printers and copiers. This room also has glass walls. There are no doors, just openings with panes on either side. In order to better mark the entrances and prevent accidents, Dagmar Heppner was invited to develop a project that would, on the one hand, make the use of the space more self-explanatory and, on the other hand, make its function easy to read.
The Artist’s Solution
The point of departure for her research was the CMYK coloring printing system, which is used on a daily basis in the copy room. In four-color printing, the colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are used and printed over one another sequentially as a dot screen. To prevent moiré patterns, the printing film of each screen is rotated before the exposure (cyan 15°, magenta 75°, yellow 0°, black 45°). The distances between the dots in the grid remain the same, only the size of the dots changes. The artist based her project on this process, identifying the openings in the walls with vertical rows of colored dots visible from both sides. She sketched a course related to the spatial situation whose intensity decreases as it moves from the opening to the center of the glass wall. She sent the grid of individual dots she worked on on the computer to a labeling studio, which used machines to cut out the dots from colored film, which she then pasted on by hand at the site.
Roman Kurzmeyer
