Henning Christiansen
Die Freiheit ist um die Ecke

René Block had a close and long-standing friendship with the Danish Fluxus composer Henning Christiansen – in 1969, Christiansen performed the concert “Ich versuche dich freizulassen (machen)” together with Joseph Beuys at the Akademie der Künste. The neon object Die Freiheit ist um die Ecke (Freedom is around the corner) was created “in memoriam” in the year of the artist’s death. The phrase appears again and again in different forms and contexts in Christiansen’s oeuvre, for example as a versatile stamp in various languages (Danish, German, English). For the wall object, a handwritten version of the sentence was enlarged and applied to a metal body in green neon lettering. The sentence is underlined by a neon line – which does not end with the last letter, however, but bends downwards “around the corner”. The neon image, which is to be mounted diagonally on the wall, glows in green, the artist’s trademark color with political and ecological connotations since the 1970s.
Text: Eva Scharrer