Sunday, 22nd January 2023, 3 p.m. - 4.30 p.m
Conversation with the participating artists in the exhibition
Moderators: Sebastian Freytag and Georg Elben

The history of wall painting goes back to its beginnings in cave painting. Even before the canvas became established as a typical carrier medium for paintings, artists worked on interior and exterior walls, used them as information and documentation surfaces, but also discovered the potential in the combination of art and architecture. Since the 1960s, graffiti and so-called murals have adorned many streets and residential buildings in the USA and Central Europe. They are site-specific and help the subculture to reclaim public space. Well-known artists such as Sol LeWitt in the USA or Blinky Palermo in Germany appropriated this artistic practice and brought the site-specific wall painting back into the exhibition space. The opportunity to work large and expansive and to be able to react to the specific architecture and individual stories of the place, while at the same time realizing artistic works internationally without major transport costs, makes it a popular exhibition medium, even if exhibitions of its own have rarely been dedicated to it up to now .

The exhibition WALL-BOUND consists of six large walls in three former classrooms in a wing of the Martin Luther King Comprehensive School. Three artists from North Rhine-Westphalia, who belong to about the same generation, have entered a painterly dialogue. Two at a time, directly, because their walls face each other, and the whole group, because they all work non-representationally and are mostly not (yet) known for their wall-bound work. It is true that WALL-BOUND cannot be an overview of mural painting today, as the number of artists invited would be too small for that. And yet the range of positions is astounding, and in the Marl exhibition it ranges from seemingly collaged form compositions to gestural-lyrical painting.

On Sunday, 22nd January 2023, the participating artists will tour the exhibition rooms at 3 p.m. with museum director Georg Elben and co-curator and artist Sebastian Freytag. In an open discussion, they talk about the potential of site-specific art indoors and outdoors, the interactive relationship between art and architecture in wall paintings, and artistic challenges in the realization of wall-based works.