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Calatrava and Stella Join Forces in Berlin

by Ian Volner | Thursday, April 28, 2011 | 3 Comments

Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish-born artiste of engineering marvels like Sweden’s Turning Torso, has just completed a collaboration with prominent American painter and sculptor Frank Stella. On view though August 14 at the New National Gallery in Berlin, Germany, “Stella & Calatrava: The Michael Kohlhaas Curtain” combines a 98-foot mural by the artist with a sculptural steel frame by the architect to create one massive, looming ensemble.

Says Calatrava, 60, “The beauty of this installation is that it plays with the human scale, incorporating the spectator into the painting as well as into the sculpture… By putting the canvas inside of the sculptural ring and enclosing it, you almost get an infinite dimension because there is no beginning and no end.”

Hanging from the ceiling, the installation exudes a very impressive presence, making it a peculiarly apt stand-in for the story from which the piece takes its name. Kohlhaas (not to be confused with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) was the hero of an eponymous novel by proto-modernist German author Heinrich von Kleist, whose picaresque travails in Renaissance Saxony begin with the expropriation of his horses and end with his execution. It’s a little difficult to discern the precise connection between it and the new piece by the duo of Frank and Sandy, but there does seem to be a shared theme of mystery and existential angst.

Following the close of the Berlin show, the installation moves to the Museo Pablo Serrano in Zaragoza, Spain.

Images courtesy of www.palladium.de, Barbara Burg/Oliver Schuh.