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animal pain • tierschmerz unbreakable ceramic figures berlin 1993
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I built a series of ceramic figures while living at Uta's place in Zinnowiter Street. The flat was cosy and secluded; it overlooked a stretch of Niemandsland where the Wall had stood, between the last tram station and the cemetary. She let me use a bag of clay I found and I made an elephant, as much to kill the daytime as anything else. I was working nights in the Irish Pub while Uta studied to be a doctor at the Charité Hospital nearby (she later gave up medicine to paint). She would bring home very expensive, richly illustrated books crammed with deformity and human dissection. I rarely glanced at them - she didn't like them either. She had a 'yellow' phobia, said it was the colour of cancer. She painted in the kitchen - before I ever picked up a brush - while making bread; darkly childish portraits of family members looking like Cludo suspects, and of her black cat Salome. The oils were always thickly applied during an intensity of concentration I had never before witnessed. She was exorcising her demons. The town- and landscapes were just as menacing despite innocent titles: 'Bohemian Landscape' (smog-belching industrial chimneys on the Dresden-Prague road). When she wasn't preparing an exhibition, writing, singing folk-songs, learning Russian, Spanish, French and English or studying for exams; then we were off to Prague in her Trabbi to drink black beers in a bar with miniature theater built in the cellar. Among a privileged few we would witness brilliant theatrical experiments screamed at us in Czech and performed by Uta's beloved actor friends... (unfinished) |
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DARWIN |
