This show represents the ninth close collaboration between LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur and the Westfälischer Kunstverein for the RADAR series. Lulu MacDonald (b. 1991, UK) has devised an installation specially for the Galerie der Gegenwart titled "Paper, Snow, A Ghost" that focuses centrally on the relationship between three-dimensional space and surface.

The work diffuses the boundary between surface and sculpture and sets up a dynamic in the process between everyday infrastructure and the art object. The wallpaper covering the entire wall space of the gallery as a starting point for artistic considerations has a dual function: first of all spatially, by physically marking out the wall area as the basis from which the work can spread out in every direction. Second, the substance paper itself situates the starting point of the work in the realm of classical techniques, such as the sketch, the drawing or print graphics. 

The second layer of the design for the walls, comprising black plotter film, encroaches minimally into the space yet spreads out dominantly and dynamically across the surfaces. Black lines on the white wallpaper recall tattoos or ink wash drawings. And just as a tattoo emphasises a particular area on a person's skin, the ornamentation activates sections of the (wall) surfaces. The layer on top of the paper, comprising cut-outs of flowers in vases reamed out of mahogany and multiplex plastic, crosses the threshold into three-dimensionality. 

The column separate from the wall made from bunny-tail grass heads also takes up the floral motif via the use of organic material.  By using bunny-tail grass, MacDonald is referencing her own background: growing up in the Channel Islands on Jersey, she experienced the annual "Battle of Flowers". In this procession, for which the locals dress the large floats with masses of flowers, bunny-tail grass is frequently used because it is indigenous and lends itself well to dyeing.  Starting from the reciprocal relations between the individual elements and their spatial setting, MacDonald is also alluding here to the gestures of giving and receiving associated with flowers and thus the general aspect of interpersonal space. 

By choosing flowers, she is also alluding to an accessible, everyday motif which runs like a thread through art history. The individual shapes have been cut out casually, their settings on the wallpaper recalling Henri Matisse's cut-outs and interiors. Via the fluid transition between two- and three-dimensionality, MacDonald dissolves the hierarchy between the foreground and background, lending the installation a distinct lightness and ease. 

Lulu MacDonald lives and works in Hamburg. She completed her degree in sculpture at the HFBK Hamburg, University of Fine Arts last year.

RADAR is an exhibition format devised by the LWL-Museums für Kunst und Kultur and the Westfälischer Kunstverein. It features young, lesser-known but emerging artists who are now "on the radar" so to speak. The works on show provide an insight into the areas of work in which the artists are currently engaged.

 The exhibition is curated by Eline van Dijk und Jenni Henke. 

_{Photo: LWL/Anne Neier}