State coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia (plastic)
The coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia is the title of a sculpture by Ferdinand Kriwet . It was created in 1988 for the artistic design of the plenary hall of the state parliament building in North Rhine-Westphalia and reproduces the coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia in a serial , abstract and alienated manner.
Explanation
The sculpture is a commissioned work to fulfill the building culture's obligation of the builder to create art in buildings , and is one of a number of examples of furnishing the back of parliamentary platforms with state or national symbols .
It consists initially of an inconspicuous, 240 cm high and 605 cm wide plate, which is installed on a concave wooden wall behind the Landtag presidium . A total of 3630 cylindrical metal pins made of aluminum (30 × 121 metal pins) are attached to this plate. Their circular upper sectional planes are colored in the North Rhine-Westphalian state colors red, white and green as well as in gold (for sepals of the Lippe rose ). This results in a point grid from a total of 3630 color points. The color dots, which are reminiscent of pixels on an electronic display board, result in a total of 13 square representations of the state coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia in serial repetition, with a large, almost square coat of arms in the middle consisting of 930 color dots (30 × 31 color dots) and an six square coats of arms each with 225 colored dots (15 × 15 colored dots) are arranged on both sides.
Because of the limited number of colored dots, which is associated with a low image resolution , the viewer is not able to really clearly see the heraldic elements of the national coat of arms - the wavy bar of the Rhine , the Westphalia horse and the Lippe rose. The rough grid typography of the sculpture suggests it - even to a trained eye - abstractly at best . For a person who does not know the national coat of arms in its conventional representation, it may not even be possible to recognize a coat of arms, but only a four-color dot matrix graphic with repetitive structures. Due to the reduction of the figurative representation, the alienation of the coat of arms as a well-known figurative mark and the play with the optical effects of a dot grid, the work appears in the tradition of Op Art and Pop Art ( German Pop Art ).
In the presentation of the country emblem, the artist moved to the Bauhaus -Künstlerin Mitscherlich Immeke created tapestry of the old parliament in on the front side of the Chamber Ständehaus Dusseldorf , which represented the country heraldic symbols already serially. The tapestry hung there from 1951 to 1986 and formed the background of television broadcasts from the state parliament.
The artist also explicitly linked to the structuralist architecture of the new state parliament building, the design principle of which is the sequence and modification of the same basic forms. He also stated that he wanted to create an overall picture suitable for television, in which the speakers and the presidium are highlighted by a suitable background.
Some critics interpret the object which designed a complete picture of individual color dots, as a successful artistic analogy to the opinion-making process in the political public , which eventually form opinion makers from the coincidence of many individual opinions. Other critics judge the object as "heraldically strange and inadequate" and as an expression of a "broken relationship to state symbols".
literature
- Rolf Nagel: The state coat of arms in the new Düsseldorf state parliament . In: Der Herold , issue 5/1991, p. 137 f.
- Rolf Nagel: Origin, shape and use of the coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia . In: History in the West . Year 1996, issue 1, p. 43 ( PDF ).
- Ferdinand Kriwet. "State coat of arms of North Rhine-Westphalia" . In: President of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (ed.), Hans Zinnkann, Irmgard Birn, Dorothea Dietsch, Thomas Schneider, Sebastian Wuwer (editor): Art in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia . Without date, p. 8 ( PDF , online ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Art in Parliament - Immeke Mitscherlich 85 years: Tapestry with Ross, Rose and Rhine . In: State Parliament internal . Edition of March 20, 1984, p. 20
- ↑ Immeke Mitscherlich , Biography in the portal projektmik.com , accessed on 23 October 2018