magic is behind the curtain as doctor faustus lights the light

The world in a box. The world in a repository, container, space for safekeeping. The world as a box? Is that conceivable? And, more importantly, can boxes be a viable medium for an artist after Joseph Cornell, who epitomized the box and annexed it for his art? Instead of a direct answer here comes my proposition: The fact is that nobody challenges an artist who executes an oil on canvas, stating that, for instance, since Rubens did many of his works in oil on canvas, the possibility of oil paintings is no longer conceivable for anyone. Now Lilly Grote has been producing boxes for years. And they are hers. They are her boxes alone. And the only parallel they share with the boxes built by Joseph Cornell is the fact that they are boxes. Worlds absorbed into boxes.

The nature of these parallels are … definitely finite; most particularly because the artist Lilly Grote carries a remarkable degree of independence in her baggage. If inspecting this luggage, it reveals art worlds filled to the rafters with heavy weight imagination. True poetic heavy weights are the content of Lilly Grote’s suitcases containing artificial artistic universes made up of illusions and selected by the magician Lilly Grote. Most of the materials used come from our everyday routine. They are part of our commonly shared experiences. Many of the items were thrown out in a society whose cycles absorb the individual elements of consumerism and hence trash much that could still be used but must go, just because. Grote bends down, picks up such matter, inspects it and re-inspects it, asking any number of pertinent questions. A shared memory of storing items. Of recycling and storing them in warehouses, on harddrives, as well as on metal shelves. Waiting for the when to come. Patiently awaiting the moment of their resurrection. Art historians are never short of language, calling such things object trouvé, a technical term reaching back to the earlier parts of the 20th century. Grote keeps good company here. Yet she is an equal among equals. Found objects, assembled like driftwood after a high tide and kept and stored, inspected and reconsidered by the magician. Lilly Grote thus commands over a storage of utensils she uses as plants for her simulated magic garden.