Nicole Wermers: Reclining Fanmail: Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland

In the work of Nicole Wermers an exploration of urban space is combined with considerations on the formal idioms and materials of modernism. In particular, she addresses the sociological, economic, and psychological aspects of these spaces, expressed in an interest in how real and reproduced materials, surfaces, and places communicate concepts such as desire and power. Wermers’s works decode strategies of urban consumer and everyday culture, for example the appropriation of art history as a form of cultural capital, and they trace the development of complex phenomena in modernism into homogeneous designer surfaces.

For Kunsthaus Glarus, Nicole Wermers had made a new series of works devoted to the reclining figure, a wellknown motif in the history of art. On the one hand, her figures recall their sculptural equivalents in public spaces, but by placing them on cleaning trolleys Wermers also indicates a context that mostly plays out at the margins of public life—care and maintenance work. These cleaning trolleys are all individually designed, and so they also become sculptural elements in their own right in addition to serving as plinths. In combination with the reclining figure this creates a situation whereby the female body permits itself a respite, both in terms of its art-historical ascriptions and also menial maintenance work.