Klara Meinhardt. Soft Utopian City

In the organizer's words:

Curator's tour of the artwork with Jenny Graser

Klara Meinhardt deals intensively with urban spaces, be it by focusing on the displacement of nature or by examining the materialities of architecture. She explores the latter in Soft Utopian City. She is interested in sustainable construction with natural materials, such as wood and local stone, as well as the design possibilities and form-giving potential inherent in all materials. She also focuses on the changes to landscapes caused by the extraction of raw materials or the processing of building rubble.

In the installation Soft Utopian City, Meinhardt succeeds in combining the urban with nature. The individual foam elements are organic. Their shapes are borrowed from nature, but the artist has invented them freely. Meinhardt printed the fabric covers with motifs that she encountered in quarries and in the forest. There she photographed sandstone surfaces and watercourses, among other things. However, the motifs also include enlarged details of broken glass or a concrete fence in the characteristic, geometric GDR design. In addition, the printing process Meinhardt used to design the covers is based on the cyanotype technique, which is closely associated with nature.

The Soft Utopian City is therefore temporary, just like the cyclical cycle of nature, which is based on growth, renewal and transience.

We ask you to exercise caution when using the elements. Use at your own risk.