Going down to the basement to try and find a light bulb, I again was in the fantastic atmosphere of dark, burrowing, creepy, sort of dungeon-like basement filled with vivid light cells where Marcus Wittmers and his assistants are working at all hours on his large ironic fibreglass polychromatic sculptures. Superman is crouched in a corner looking ashen faced up at the sky, and outside an even larger Superman is crashing to the ground splitting his head open. Marcus is great. Because he works such late hours down there, he has always rescued me when my key or the front door lock jammed.
No bulb was to be found but one of the sculptors said she had a halogen spotlight that I could have, so we went up to the ground floor to get it. Wiebke Wachmann's large studio, every bit, was completely painted with multilayered, dazzling white, and one wall had banks of white fluorescent tubes like gym bars. The effect was of a literal fog of white, palpable whiteness filling the room. It is like a James Turrell but she has installations within this and makes photographic sculptures from it. Behind all those heavy steel doors at the Milchhof there are many surprises. Lisabetta, a painter on the first floor, has got a commission to do one hundred and thirty pictures all to strict specification of the same size, 120 x 140 cm. and technique, for an Anthroposophist Hospital that requires the Rudolph Steiner technique. This uses very thin water-based layers of the primary colours red, yellow, blue, on top of each other, making orange, green, and purple paintings. The differences in colour come about by the sequence of the applications. There are to be two paintings of the same all-over colour, in each of the sixty-five rooms, one on either side of the television, facing the bed. To me this sounds like a surrealistic fable, but I can see that it might be quite soothing.
