Richard Deacon

Richard Deacon contributed two monumental undulating sculptures to the 1987 edition of Skulptur Projekte. Ten years later, when he was again invited to take part, he created a floor relief sculpture for a large open area of the Schlossplatz that was mainly used as a car park. Deacon was interested in this site because of the contrast between the open, urban location and the rather scruffy, purely functional space.¹

After Poussin consisted of a stainless steel beam enclosed by a snaking asphalt track. A characteristic feature of Deacon’s sculptures is that they take their shape from the human body, and this piece was no exception. After Poussin specifically referred to a work by the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin, where the central motif – the stiff corpse of a man with a snake wrapped around it – is almost engulfed in the depiction of a panoramic landscape.² This inspired Deacon to place his asphalt snake with the rigid steel beam in the similarly expansive urban landscape of the Schlossplatz.

Daniel Friedt

¹ Klaus Bußmann, Kasper König and Florian Matzner (eds.), Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997, exhib. cat. Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997, pp. 115–117.

² Nicolas Poussin, Paysage avec un homme tué par un serpent [Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake], ca. 1648, oil on canvas, 119 x 198.5 cm, National Gallery, London, inventory number: NG5763.