François Morellet

In 1987 François Morellet had red bricks set flush into the ground at regular intervals. The bricks formed lines describing geometric shapes that cut through paths and lawns in the Schlossgarten: a circle, a square and a triangle. Even after the work was purchased the bricks were not secured by foundations. Thus they gradually came loose from their settings: some sunk further into the moist ground, others were pushed up by the frost and were broken by the rotating blades of lawn mowers in the following spring. But certain sections of the circle are still clearly visible in the asphalted driveway to the building of Schlossgarten 3.

Morellet’s oeuvre frequently includes various works that make reference to architecture, in which the emphasis on individual components shows that for all its complexity the human-built world is founded on basic elements. In his work for Skulptur Projekte 1987 Morellet also incorporated a historical dimension in his concept. The Schlossgarten, now a landscaped park modelled on the English tradition, was originally planned as a formal garden in the French style, with geometrical parterres, symmetrical hedged paths and a fountain standing in a circular basin. Whereas landscape planners around the mid-19th century replaced the geometric arrangements of their predecessors with designs that supposedly imitated nature, Morellet imposed rigorously geometric shapes on a plan of the landscape garden. These “French” forms were implemented as dashed lines inscribed in the garden with brick, a typical regional building material. For Morellet this was an amusing play on overlayered historical traces that at the same time emphasised the park’s present-day condition.

Eckhard Kluth