Eduard Kiesmann 

<   7 Day Weekend   >

Eduard Kiesmann - 7 Day Weekend

The floral motifs in Eduard Kiesmann’s work emerge from a very specific point of origin: his immediate surroundings. Having grown up in the Allgäu, he now finds comparable landscapes in Berlin mainly within cemeteries and their peripheral zones. These spaces, situated somewhere between cultivation and overgrowth, form the starting point of the works.

Cemeteries occupy a peculiar place within cultural history. Though shaped by loss and remembrance, they are often spaces of remarkable stillness and beauty. Removed from the pace of everyday life, they preserve forms of attention that have largely disappeared elsewhere: slow growth, aging surfaces, and the quiet coexistence of architecture and vegetation.

Throughout art history, from Romantic landscape painting to Symbolism, cemeteries repeatedly appeared as places where beauty and transience converge. In this sense, they are not only connected to death, but also to continuity, transformation, and the persistence of memory.

The focus is not on the grave itself, but on the vegetation that overlays and transforms these sites over time Plants penetrate structures, occupy gaps, and shift existing orders. The cemetery appears not as a static place, but as a

site of continuous transformation.

In the recent works, representation recedes into the background. The focus shifts toward growth, layering, and transformation. The cemetery no longer appears solely as a place associated with death, but as a space defined by ongoing change.

This logic encounters a contrasting system within the exhibition space. Galleries and museums structure,

contextualise, and stabilise. They determine not only what becomes visible, but also how it is framed, preserved, and

perceived over time. In contrast to the cemetery, where growth, decay, and transformation remain in constant motion, the exhibition space attempts to slow these processes down. It creates an ordered environment in which things are held in place, protected from disappearance, and sustained through continued engagement and reflection.

Both spaces share a structural proximity. They organise time and hold in place what is subject to change. In the cemetery, this occurs through maintenance and care; within the exhibition space through contextualisation, presentation, and conservation.

The moment a work enters the exhibition marks a shift. It becomes visible, leaves the state of process, and begins to appear as something fixed or complete. Presentation enables visibility, but it also introduces a certain form of stabilisation. One could speak of a kind of autonomous existence that begins at this point, while at the same time marking a form of death, as the works are, from that moment onward, withdrawn from the artist’s direct control and ongoing intervention.

The title Seven Day Weekend describes a condition in which the distinction between work and leisure dissolves. In the song of the same name by Grace Jones, the weekend expands into a permanent state. What initially appears as freedom gradually loses definition through its continuity. In this context, relaxation becomes unstable. It exists only in relation to tension. Without this difference, it loses meaning. Taken to its extreme, absolute relaxation begins to resemble a form of stillness in which all friction disappears. Life, however, derives much of its intensity and quality precisely from the shifting relation between tension and release, activity and rest. Without this contrast, experience risks becoming static and indistinct.

Eduard Kiesmann’s works operate within this tension. They engage with processes of change while simultaneously entering systems that seek to stabilise and organise them. Yet rather than resolving this contradiction, the works seem to draw much of their intensity from it. Their particular quality emerges precisely in the shifting relation between tension and release, movement and stillness, openness and fixation. What becomes visible is less a frozen image than a condition held temporarily in balance.

Hagen Schümann