Opening of the exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, December 4, 2005.

Dr. Viola Altrichter

Every box, every box, every light object by Lilly Grote turns into a little revelation for those who want to get involved with themselves. Over the past 10 years, around 120 boxes have been created.

These mini-cosms are of astonishing, political, poetic, surreal originality and uniqueness, abysmal - subterranean, profound and of fine irony and congeniality. In their messages, these miracle chambers are intangible and rich as life itself. Each performs its own "play" with a cast of roles from all levels of consciousness in human history, from which feed our dreams, fairy tales, myths and our repressed fears and hopes. The walk along these magic boxes is a meeting with old acquaintances, good friends and unpleasant guests in ourselves. Everyone builds in his own border area, on the fence between illusion and reality, again his own box. And so during this exhibition as many boxes as visitors have enjoyed.

To a high art form Lilly Grote has brought the "de-location" of things. Similar to the surrealists in front of her, things are torn from their usual functions and determinations of existence and put into surprising, foreign to alienated contexts.

Consider the fur-lined cups by Meret Oppenheim, the flowing clock on Dali, the film "The Choking Gel" by L. Bunuel, or just a "FOREST FROM SPOONS" by Lilly Grote.

Of special attraction are the light objects. Coming from film, LG masterfully masters the art of seduction by playing with the shadows, the darkness and the light between times and spaces. It is always the "in-between", the unsayable, the indiscernible, which in the handling of light unveils deep layers of space in truly "magical" ways, letting people step into subtle rapprochements or distances, or exposing things against the backdrop of graded darknesses to make secret messages from forgotten rooms light up.

In every dream, images appear in our heads, without which the separating consciousness of an inner and outer, an "either-or" sets in. In the dream, the dreamed and the dreaming merge. The dream of Lilly Grote plays a big role in the process of creating the boxes. Sometimes a picture whispers in the dream and calls for a suitable box. Sometimes Lilly Grote has to spend days looking into an empty box, feeling the wood and listening to what she has to tell - until suddenly the empty space in the box fills with a precise picture. The texture of a box, its patina, its incisions, the traces of decades, even centuries, become an inspiring factor for the work. Again and again, LG tries to preserve the former function of the box and incorporate it into the work - such. For example, cutlery in the "SPOON PARADE", a box that used to be a cutlery box. Each box as such is always inspiring. The message is in the box for Lilly Grote, as if the sculptor had already finished the sculpture in an unhewn marble stone.

Most of Lilly Grote's work hides spiritual messages. They trace the traces of sunken cultures and their once holy places, temples, totem and fetish worlds. They quote Greek and Egyptian fragments of myths, Hindu, Indian or Christian symbols appear before us. It shine holy trees. Nature itself becomes a sacred place again. For example, in the work "SHADOWS": on an infernally incandescent snow landscape, an Egyptian Osiris figure stands under a wishing tree, hung with fetishes like horsehair or lumps of resin. Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead and the resurrection, announces in the middle of winter of the eternal circular immortality of nature.

In the series "Seti Signals" (Search of Exterritorial Intelligence), artificial skies are not only illuminated, but also brought to color transformations, as in the slowly rotating light discoloration of the heavenly messages in the boxes "DISTANCE", "CLUSTER M 22 "or" ANDROMEDA ". The light itself as a symbol of cyclically circulating infinity replaces obsolete earthly and religious promises of happiness.

"STRINGS", a titled box from the series "Space", is a term from cosmology and thus describes the universe, which consists of the finest filaments and whose vibration produce the elementary particles in the universe depending on the mode of oscillation. Seen in this way, the colored woolen threads stretched in the box "STRINGS" have a universal meaning. The threads reveal the skeletonized façade of a demolition room, where a swarm of gloriously blue parrots flies free in the air. Birds of paradise in front of a ruined house - heaven and earth, life and death held together by the thread of life that contains and preserves all opposition.

In the series: "HEAVEN IN THE BOX", the heavens are reflected in the water, or one hovers, as it were, between heaven and earth, looking over and over the clouds and developing a feeling of boundless floating freedom. Again it is, as in the work "CUMULUS", an object of human hands, a vise - culturally historically associated with squeezing, even torture, - which moves from the outside the whole box, no, earth and sky simultaneously in the restricting dimension of human proportions , However, Lilly Grote also leaves open the ironic gap here, setting reflections and riddles in the frame for the observer.

Lilly Grote squats like Hagzissa, the witch, "sitting on the fence," on the wall between reality and dream, reality and imagination, and presents us today with a forgotten yesterday or a longed-for future, brings back the savage in the tamed, nature into civilization and heaven to earth.

So what do we expect from the SKY IN THE BOX that would not be in us?

copyright: Dr. med. Viola Altrichter

Freelance lecturer in cultural sociology and radio author of radio plays and features

Matterhornstraße 63, 14129 Berlin, Tel: 030-8037585, e-mail: viola.altrichter@acor.de