∞ in the Forest

From the Catalogue: “With her artistic intervention in a dense pole forest in Adelstetten, the artist Katrin Brand, declares the high value of nature. Very high is the value and can not be given in numbers, and our economically thinking society has never tried to measure it so far! So she herself estimates the value as nothing less than “infinitely valuable”. That seems to us all self-evident, banal, a easy-peasy answer! What sounds as self-evident as “infinitely valuable”, Katrin Brand turns into a monumental statement and a multi-perspective experience: as a composite infinity symbol on tree trunks in approx. 8m height, approx. 20m width and approx. 20m depth. The tree trunks themselves, on which she climbs to apply the painting with swamp lime, form the canvas and the vertical lines of a bar code. A high-wire act that is a desired challenge for the trained sport climber! The real force of this statement lies in the simplicity and dimension of the work! The implicitness so massively and elaborately expressed should shake us awake. We humans are the last link of the food chain. If all other parts would fall away, we would have lost everything and would be lost ourselves. There would be no winner! Katrin Brand creates a 2-dimensional picture from a 3-dimensional piece of forest with about 25-30 trees. This change of dimensionality from spatiality to surface is a creative finesse that makes one take notice and shows the unique artistic claim of this work. It requires a specific standpoint within the forest, which the artist has marked in the form of a picture frame, so that the viewer can decipher and recognize this 2-dimensional image in the middle of the forest at all. At this one point of view all perspectives unite to a clear statement.”