Complex project for café and bakery Rischart at the Marienplatz in Munich.

in cooperation with architect Markus Link

The task was to create a ceiling painting in the dressing room for the employees of the café and bakery Rischart. After becoming familiar with the building and its operation, I proposed the concept of murals repeating in the places of central communications. The goal was to create an environment which is not only positive, but also unique and with which the employees could identify. The design was based on my paintings and counted on one motif, the size of which and whose density of the lines are variable depending on a particular location: In the corridors of the dressing room in the basement, in the high light well of the staircase, leading from the second to the fifth floor, in the central area in front of the offices of the owners, in the rooms designed for meetings on the fifth floor, and around the stairs to the café for the employees on the sixth floor. The most generous form is in the staircase area, while in the seating area in front of the office of the owner I created lines concentrated into a dense web having rather a character of hanging picture.

The theme of the paintings is a number of red surfaces originating from five intersecting layers of wavy lines. On each layer the wavy lines are arranged parallel to each other. The directions of the individual layers form a geometric relationship based on the pentagram. None of the directions is perpendicular or parallel to the orthogonal architecture. The wavy lines are defined by their surrounding red surfaces, through which no line of the wave intersects. I laid the individual surfaces with a brush and the structure of brush painting was preserved.

The delineating of the lines by the surrounding red area, the memory of the lines and fragments of the ornaments are like their traces in the mind. I thought of the ancient Cretan concept, “… in which, unlike the Greek, everything seems to float and shows only in being, it does not present itself in the power and drama of the match” (Petr Rezek). It is a world of gardens designated for rapture, rest, and meditation. It is also a world of desire and beauty.

During the painting of them or looking at them at close range, the individual surfaces break up into a scattering of tiny red, as if chaotically arranged fragments. Only at a more focused look the omitted lines appear, their structure and the order of the structure of the red surfaces. This double reading remains ever present in the paintings. In the same year, I painted a number of paintings this way.