About the installation
In this work Oskar: A Camouflage, specially conceived for the site, artist Olaf Nicolai uses camouflage to make the location apparently disappear and thus stagea complex reenactment of the site’s momentous history.
At the same time, he sets this history in a broader context, referencing the work of the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer who was ostracized by the Nazis. The installation thus addresses the conditions for art and artists under a dictatorship. The radical modernity of the Bauhaus is echoed in the abstract pattern of the camouflage, derived from a design Schlemmer made in 1941. The design was not, however, intended to be artistic but was conceived for the functional purpose of camouflage. The constructive link between the artistic genres of architecture and painting propagated by the Bauhaus a few years earlier was now perverted into a fatal symbiosis between painting and war.
