… in a nutshell

Sizes can only ever be determined relatively on the basis of an arbitrarily chosen comparative scale. Thus the sculpture shown here, DR. SAUGERZ DE KUNST (DER ERZROSAROTEPAULCHENPANTHERZ DE LARGE GÄHNT) by the artist Jonathan Meese measures a height of 2.32 meters. However, this value is not absolute, but merely refers to a comparison with the so-called original meter, a scale that has been kept in Paris since 1791 and has become increasingly precise over the course of time; today, a meter is defined as 299,792,458th part of a light second.

The exhibition ...in a nutshell brings together sculptures, paintings and works on paper in a wide variety of formats, whereby we repeatedly encounter miniatures or versions of original works that are related in motif, seemingly identical, or at least similar, and yet fundamentally different in their altered repetition. Just as Alice appears huge or tiny depending on her surroundings on her journey through Wonderland and is confronted with the relativity of size and her own perception, different sized versions of a work of art are intertwined here. As the small mirrors the large and, conversely, the large mirrors the small, an implicit understanding of constructions of reality opens up, ways of perceiving proximity and distance appear and an experience of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is hinted at.

The small version of a work can certainly stand on an equal footing with a larger one. As the philosopher and spatial theorist Gaston Bachelard emphasizes, miniatures in their condensed form not only show us the world on a new scale, but also reveal it in a different light and are capable of evoking dreams. For they allow new freedom of design or, as William Shakespeare has Hamlet put it: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space".