The site-specific wall installation is a trompe l'œil and shows the image of a wooden frame set into the wall, in whose dark glass the empty exhibition space is reflected.
The image was printed on fleece wallpaper and covers the whole width of the wall.
Text from the catalogue "Glass and Concrete", Marta Herford
by Linnea Semmerling
Daniela Friebel's works combine a baroque fascination with deception and illusion with contemporary conceptual photography. What is it about this dark glass pane? How did it get into the otherwise windowless rooms of Marta Herford? In fact, the work is not a glass pane at all, but an optically sophisticated photographic wallpaper.
Although the room seems to be reflected in it, the picture remains deserted even when there is a large crowd. Through this play with our perceptual habits, a supposedly insignificant pane turns into an image that is worth looking at in detail and from different angles. It remains unclear what is hidden behind the mirror surface. It could be the tinted glass pane of an interrogation room from which the events in the gallery are observed, but it could also be a transparent window out into a dark world. Friebel's deceptive depiction thus exposes our expectations of the optical properties of glass, in which - even if we cannot see through it - we always hope to see ourselves again.
