Photography by Marcus Mainz.
“Our living space is quietly dominated by a painting of Apollo by the German artist Willi Baumeister (1889–1955), created in 1922. The artist presents the ancient god of the arts as an architectural composition in a decidedly mechanised aesthetic. He was searching for the new human being who – after the senselessness of the First World War – could master the promises and challenges of the machine age to create a new, better existence, while at the same time recalling the archaic, ‘pure’ elements of human life. We simply hung the painting amidst a 16-part photographic work by Tobias Zielony (*1973), which deals with a utopia following the next major war – the Second World War. Vele, from 2010, is named after the location where the work was created, and whose residents are portrayed in it. In Naples in the 1970s, architecture was seen as a means of enabling people to live better, together. The brutalist highrise estate on the outskirts of the city was, it seems, taken over by the Camorra even before completion, and is thus familiar to many as the backdrop to the film Gomorrah.
One could see our room as a documentation of the unfulfilled hopes of the 20th century. And yet, Zielony’s Piranesi-like gloom makes Apollo – god of light, after all – shine all the brighter. As do the portraits of his descendants in the 21st century.”
DIRK BOLL is an art market expert who works for Christie’s, a world-leading art and luxury business. His handbook “Art and its Market” was published in 2024 in six volumes.