The room’s setting and architecture were appealing. The materials are the simplest construction materials, which are also used on building sites: timber and construction steel. With them, I attempted to develop a kind of reactive sculpture to the room’s architecture, meaning the openings, the windows, which have a very important function here.

I went from the rough into the detail. At first, it was simple divisions, simple compositional elements, like the diagonals, then the step-like ascent and behind it the drain, the draining, this falling. Caved in, collapsed. The rear parts I had to let collapse, because that results in a tension between order and collapsed construction. I wouldn’t say chaos, but order, principle of order and collapsed order exists. The ensemble perhaps resembles a ruin that I myself worked hard for and with which I reacted to parts that I found here: the tower, that was a unique experience for me. I went across there again and again. For me, it was a construction, a square. It has something of the ruinous and nevertheless something very strong in this ruinousness.

Construction as relict, as witness to a time, or construction as witness to the passage of time, that was important to me here. The forms actually result from body movements. I would really like to reconstruct the movements, for example those of the steel line, if I could.

(Excerpts from a conversation with ROBERT SCHAD, 1986, printed in the catalogue Kunstraum.Raumkunst, Vienna/Buchberg 1986)

www.robertschad.eu