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Hilde Fuchs :
Installation in the Government District St. Pölten

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St. Pölten, 2001
Regierungsviertel, Haus 2, Aufzüge, Neue Herrengasse 17, 3100 St. Pölten

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Hilde Fuchs has installed four carpet paintings made of plastic on the floor of the lifts in the two buildings that house the department for culture and science, as "step-on original paintings" (Fuchs). The ornamental images are inspired by Arabic carpet patterns.

The piece was designed to react to the special spatial situation of elevators. 4 picture carpets were installed in the elevators of the department for culture and science (buildings 1 and 2) in the government quarter. The word “Elements” in the title defines the elevator as a basic element of construction – an agile cell in an otherwise rigid building. The experience of time and space takes place here in a context of very extreme reduction, which results in a focus on oneself (the single significant furnishing object is thus often the mirror). When the elevator is used by more than one person at the same time, it also often leads to an immediate experience of an oppressed personal aura. To move into focus the various components of this form of “self-experience” and to use it as a specific quality, there is an object intervention by means of so-called "Plastics". Spatial and material idioms articulate a shift in visual conventions and value ideas. Plastic carpets become originals of painting that can be walked on, while one is experiencing various ups and downs of one’s own states of being in a "marvelous state of floating" between cultural order systems. Various motives measure the degree of identification.
(Hilde Fuchs)