Lilly Grote creates possible worlds, models in miniature, as the reality might be - her work describes a possible state of affairs, a pure play of ideas. With Paul Valery: "To see is to forget the name of the seen."

And how does Lilly Grote create these possible worlds? Stage sets, curiosity cabinets or dream machines, strange figure worlds or the conjuration of fetishes - they all open up new, unexpected contexts of reference. The techniques used in assemblage and three-dimensional object montage are not handled in a virtuoso manner, they are interpreted in a very personal and idiosyncratic way, and a variety of references between art, culture and imagination are placed in a highly lyrical way in a relationship-oriented and knowledgeable image. The narrative link between reality and fiction corresponds to the aesthetic: photography, sculpture and painting become equal representation methods.

Lilly Grote seems to distrust the "reliably interpreted world," the sphere of the material, the real, or even the objective. Sometimes our existence is threatened by hunters, spies, or other mystery of the box that drives their mischief. Then again familiar and unknown objects have fragile, bursting materialities or are about to mysteriously change their state of aggregation, but just now we are witnessing perhaps the last moment before miraculous transformation.

Staub, a film about the dismantling and dismantling of a border house of the GDR,

and also nautical with its mysterious, sunken into the submarine, the non-visible equipment refer to the recent break in the history of West Germany. And like September 11, 2001, the fall of the wall of thousands of video cameras was recorded in 1989.

By showing the dismantling of a guardhouse to the removal of the concrete, sensuous residual material, the dust, at the same time a symbolic content of history becomes tangible at all - formulated as a soft echo of Herder: "Everything in history is temporary; The inscription of her temple is called: Nullity and decay. We kick the dust of our ancestors and walk on the sunken debris of destroyed human formations and kingdoms. "

Dr. Ulrike Steinbrenner, Berlin, April 10