Compositions

There is infinite sadness in things that no longer serve any purpose. In the attic of this house, whose inhabitants I never knew, lies the dress of a little girl and a doll, lost in despair.

In front of the years-old loneliness of things here I feel the certainty that the iron-shod stick there, which once bit firmly into the earth of the green hills, would be just as happy if it could once again feel the cool freshness of moss as the summer hat, which now lies there dimly lit by the poor light of a skylight, if it could once again see a summer sky.

But the things we lovingly preserve retain their gratitude and are always ready to offer us their souls.

From Francis Jammes, The Paradise of Animals, 1926 (German first edition)

to Composition A.B

​Claudia Marr works with selected everyday objects from the estates of deceased people in a technically complex process in order to transform them into abstract compositions. Furnishings, items of clothing and furniture, cherished little things undergo a multi-stage artistic transformation process. They are first portrayed in photographic stagings, then ground up and finally moulded into columns that correspond to the body size of the deceased. The artist deliberately superimposes layers of material from the remains of an entire life. She carefully combines colours and structures. Nothing is left to chance when she translates the composition into a fragile abstract portrait of the person. The material appears here and there or evaporates. As it dissolves, it makes room for diffuse sensory impressions, vague memories and a sense of man’s emotional relationship to his things – after all, the attention with which he encountered them was an essential part of their being.

Now they have been removed from their actual context – the private living space – and find themselves in a new sculptural space.

In the compositions, the everyday objects with which the person surrounded themselves and which characterised them experience a new appreciation. And yet the objects are by no means aestheticised, but rather undergo a transformation detached from their function. They disappear, become allegories of the non-objective, traces of the absent, even the unrepresentable.

In abstraction, the condensate of a life is created, which condenses into an image of the ephemeral and thus resists oblivion. Epilogue takes a look at the individual aspects of human existence and allows the viewer to reflect on the past, the remembered and the value of the everyday.