“Fragility can be a very beautiful thing, more beautiful than something that is obviously made to last forever.”
C onsisting of a sequentially poured slab of concrete elevated to eye level on a stainless steel pedestal, Kleiner Pavilion is an exceptional embodiment of the philosophical contrasts and poignant, profoundly humanistic aesthetic at the heart of Isa Genzken's work. Executed in 1990, Kleiner Pavilion, which translates to small pavilion, is an elegiac example of the artist’s celebrated series of concrete sculptures which refer to her upbringing in a Germany devastated by war, and more specifically, the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At once alluding to the facades of exposed concrete buildings—the dominant stylistic trait in the architectural fabric of postwar Europe—and the fissured and derelict state of the Berlin Wall, Kleiner Pavilion brings to mind the Neo-Classical romance of ruins: yawning structures pointing to a bygone splendor that has surrendered to the wrecks of time and nature. Far from a nostalgic elegy to antiquity however, in Genzken's work the ruins stand, as noted by Dieter Schwarz, for “abandoned positions of modernity”, that prompt not only flashes of passive and raptured contemplation, but collective gestures of remembrance (Dieter Schwarz quoted in: Alex Farquharson, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Sabine Breitwieser, Isa Genzken, New York 2006, p. 54). Oscillating between construction and destruction, new beginnings and imminent decline, with its labyrinthine interior niches and crevices partially lit from above, Kleiner Pavilion compellingly rehearses the duality of beauty and decay underlying Genzken's artistic production.
