Glory
2001
Goldleaf on wood
270 x 270 x 270 cm
Christus Pavillon, Kloster Volkenroda

Mimo Mali
Fountain of happiness
Mixed media on canvas
220 x 220 x 220 cm

The Andreas Felger Kulturstiftung has invited the artist Mimo Mali in 2022 to enter into an artistic dialogue with the chambers in the Christus Pavillon (Volkenroda Monastery) created by Andreas Felger in 2001. Mali is a multidisciplinary mixed media artist, an urban nomad with North African and German roots who studied at the Art Academy in Berlin-Weissensee and currently lives in Mexico. In September 2022, the exhibition Light in the Darkness opened with Mali’s interventions in all of the nine chambers by Andreas Felger. Mali presented herself as a painter, but also worked with objects, collages and elements of spatial installation.

Among the nine rooms, the chamber entitled Glory has a special status. With simplicity, a circle in the centre of a chamber, which is completely covered with gold leaf, Felger succeeds in creating an highly powerful effect of interior design. The spatial dimension of the chamber is hardly recognizable due to the light-reflecting monochrome gold colour. It seems as if earthly dimensions have dissolved here.

Mimo Mali found an immediate access and a congenial answer to this chamber by also reacting to the spatial-pictorial specifications with reduced artistic means. She places a simple isosceles triangle in front of the golden circle. Two basic geometric shapes meet, which are often used in Christian iconography to represent the perfect, the divine and the triune. Here, the apex of the triangle projects into the centre, concentrating energy and attention of the onlooker. Inside the triangle, expressive, moving colours flow towards each other, with a “dynamic of colour application” that “goes upwards. For me, it is a Fountain of happiness that enriches the aspect of glory with that of bliss” (Mimo Mali on the occasion of the exhibition opening).

Text by Kurt Freitag