Hans Peter Adamski

born 1947 in Kloster Oesede, lives in Berlin.

A light shaft running through all the floors of the Jakob Kaiser Building is the site chosen by Hans Peter Adamski for his artistic intervention. Formerly a member of the Cologne artists group “Mülheimer Freiheit”, Adamski has installed four silhouette-like twisted ribbons – in varying shades from grey to violet to black and back to grey – which run the entire length of the wall. They ascend in parallel rows from the bottom of the shaft; the colour at first transparent, then becoming more intense and fading again as the ribbons reach the ceiling.

In this wall design en-titled “Der gordische Knoten” (The Gordian Knot). Adamski plays with the optical illusion of three-dimensionality by ‘breaking down’ the wall into a series of different coloured ‘streaks’ rising through the space in airlike formation. At the same time, the allusion to the Gordian Knot is an ironic response to the political realm in which the work is located – this is a place where difficult decisions often have to be made, similar to the mythical task of cutting the Gordian knot.