6 Tables, 36 seating cubes, paper, colored pencils, markers (Stabilo)
70 x 160 x 100 cm (tables); 38 x 38 x 38 cm (cubes)
For her 1992 work “Kinderwerkstatt” (children’s workshop), Maria Eichhorn installed a children’s workshop in the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Six low tables were built according to the artist’s instructions along with six cubic stools each, the surfaces of which were painted in the primary colors yellow, red, and blue, and their complementary colors purple, green, and orange. Colored pencils, water colors, paper and various craft materials were laid out. Although children were invited to work at the tables regularly, they could only be observed doing so by gallery visitors for half an hour per day. Otherwise only the empty workshop and the children’s creations remained on view.
Maria Eichhorn’s work is a site-specific reflection of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart’s unique character as an art space. Aside from its exhibition spaces, different workshops are available for members to use, among them the children’s workshop. Here children can draw, paint, and make arts and crafts several times a week. Exhibited as an artwork, “Kinderwerkstatt” is a meeting of two realities. The adult visitors become aware of their own entrenched patterns of perception, such as their expectations and reactions when anticipating an artwork on display and instead encountering the workshop space in the exhibition context. For the children, on the other hand, the concept of active participation poses no challenges, as they have not yet learned the passive approach assigned to a viewer in an exhibition space. For them, the space remains a children’s workshop for drawing, painting, and making.
By moving the workshop into the exhibition space, Maria Eichhorn also reveals Künstlerhaus Stuttgart’s unique identity as a site of production. Its workshops and their way of addressing the preconditions for the production of art are foundational elements of the institution, which was itself founded by artists in 1978.
The question of whether Maria Eichhorn’s unpretentious and precise interventions in social, economic, and political situations should be called “artworks” in the conventional sense can be asked both in the specific context of the Künstlerhaus and in general. Still, the works are catalysts for discourses that interrogate the relationship between artwork and the artistic field, rearranging existing conventions and allowing for them to be reinterpreted.
The work “Kinderwerkstatt” was originally developed for the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 1992 and was subsequently shown as part of the touring ifa exhibition “Embodied Logos. 14 Women Artists from Germany” starting in 1995. At the invitation of the curator Yilmaz Dziewior, Maria Eichhorn has developed the German pavilion for the Venice Biennial 2022, to be commissioned by the ifa.
