On 15 May, the first exhibition of the Westfälsicher Kunstverein will open at a different venue from its former exhibition room in the Landesmuseum. After the demolition of the museum's extension from the 1970s, various locations in Münster will serve as venues for the Kunstverein's program.

Thus for the first "outside" exhibition of the Kunstverein, an old villa from 1909 is at our disposal. The Netherlands artist Peggy Franck, born 1978 in Zevenaar, NL, has developed new installations and re-installed already existing works on site in the house’s singular rooms under the title In Rocking Motion. Franck’s installations, photographs and sculptures formally take up the ornamental intention of the interior decoration, but simultaneously oppose it by her choice of media and materials. Fullness and opulence are carried over in her works out of simple and cheap materials, which she arranges in the room into complex structures. In this way, spatial material collages come about that Franck, in turn, transforms through photography into two-dimensionality.

The villa itself is an extreme contrast to the Kunstverein's former gallery room with its clear, modernist architecture. Worlds apart from this, the villa on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring was designed by the architect and master builder Wilhelm Sunder-Plassmann at the beginning of the 20th century in a Baroque style with Jugendstil influences. Today the villa, for the most part in its original condition, has been declared an historic site and seems suspended in a sleeping-beauty state. With its decision to put on an exhibition here, the Westfälischer Kunstverein consciously made the switch from a classical and neutral white-cube situation to a room that has been inscribed with historical eclecticism. In her works against the vivid backdrop of the villa, Peggy Franck has created a meaningful contrast, whose aesthetic formal vocabulary consciously stands out from the historical references in the room, without ignoring them. Rather the exhibition seems to mirror itself in the nostalgic charm of the stately rooms. Peggy Franck has made a meticulous arrangement out of leftover fabric, foil, adhesive tape and other simple, everyday, utilitarian materials. Despite their ephemeral substance and the, at first glance, chaotic disorder in the room, we learn from the ingenious compositions how to read the mixture of Baroque-like still lifes and abstractly modern painting.

But Franck's work is not only about the aesthetics of form and material. It revolves just as much around the themes of participation and production. The artist herself is linked to another side of her work through performance; she is both her own model and image: the roles of masquerade—disguise and simultaneous self-depiction—follow a clear gender theme in her oeuvre, if only subliminally. Franck's works are in line with a long traditional, art-historical form and yet always use an up-to-date and personal visual vocabulary in order to thematize the eternal question of the production site, the artist and the viewer.

Curator: Katja Schroeder

17 June at 7 pm, Villa, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring 9
Lecture Jan Verwoert,
"Was heißt denn hier Handeln?"
 
26 July at 7 pm
Finissage on Sunday,
Artist talk with Peggy Franck
 
27 May / 24 June / 22 July at 6 pm
Guided tour with Katja Schroeder
 
Wednesday 6 pm
Public guided tours