The promise of death and the discomfort of the beautiful, gleaming black-and-white of the photograph reached an almost mimetic corporeality and at the same time transcended it in the aptly titled large work: Der Große Behälter (The Big Container) (1997). This work not only represents a carnivorous plant, but also its ‘ultimate’ form because it is in no need of improvement, as Klaus Flemming put it.The dense network of finely chiseled water tracks reminiscent of blood vessels over the shape of the quiver narrates in the most concise way imaginable the long natural history of a functionally adaptive creature that uses its functions ‘brutally’ for the sake of its own survival, whose life, as clear and transparent as its translucent skin, must feed on the death of another creature. Here too, the aesthetic taste, the fascination and the ‘Total Recall’ emerge simultaneously at all conceivable and tangible levels.
Moreover, the naturally and culturally concentrated historical references to an aesthetically highly impressive exclamation mark encourage art-historical parallels, particularly when one recalls the context of the successful installation of Der Große Behälter in an exhibition at the Hans Mayer gallery on Grabbeplatz in Düsseldorf. The print, which is over 2 m high, stood in a environement surprisingly appropriate to its nature in the ideal company of American conceptual and pop art artists such as Robert Indiana, Barry Flanagan and Keith Haring, with one significant diference: Der Große Behälter stood out amidst a colourful garden of images with its stoic black-and-white, alluding to a possibility that so far barely appeared (except for a few, partly grisaille-like portions of a James Rosenquist): the existence of something which sounds paradoxical, a self-transcending “black-and-white pop art”.
(From: Sabine Kacunko. Bacteria, Art and other Bagatelles. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna 2016, p. 18.)
