Simon Starling

The painter Adolph Menzel lived at Ritterstrasse 43 in 1847/1848. He immortalised the view from his window onto the rear courtyard in an oil sketch: Berlin Rear Courtyards in the Snow (1847/1848). The most important representative of German realism reveals himself here as a master of proto-impressionist painting, capturing the unspectacular view in the moment – in its everydayness of spectacular painterly quality.

Simon Starling, born in Epsom (UK) in 1967, who has been addressing issues such as sustainability, ecology and economics in his artistic work for years, has repeatedly turned to masterpieces of art and cultural history: Fiat and Piaggio as well as Tiepolo and Adolph Menzel.

Today, the view of the courtyard at Ritterstrasse 43 is obstructed by an apartment block with box-shaped balconies. Simon Starling translated Menzel's small-format painting, including the frame, into a monumental installation using a complex 3D printing process and combined it with a photograph of the view as it presents itself today – as a dialogue between historical and contemporary image genres, as an artistic reflection on the changes in urban space, and as a memento: While Starling was realising the Menzel project, the pandemic was raging. Public life had come to a standstill, exhibitions were postponed, people had to stay at home. Menzel's view from the window took on unexpected relevance. "The pandemic suddenly brought about this heightened sensitivity to nature. [...] You had the feeling that you could observe spring in a much more contemplative way than you normally do," said the artist, who, with Ritterstrasse 43, addresses "how we create images of nature and how that has changed."

In recent years, the work of the artist, who now lives in Copenhagen, has been shown in museums around the world. The exhibition at the Kunst Museum Winterthur presents selected groups of works by the artist in dialogue with paintings from the Oskar Reinhart Foundation – from Menzel to Starling, so to speak. Curated by Konrad Bitterli and Andrea Lutz