Elisabeth Brockmann studied painting with Gerhard Richter at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1970s. However, she was never a true painter and always leaned more towards photography instead, experimenting with poster-sized montages made up of film stills before becoming a celebrated stage designer in the 1990s. Her interventions at theaters in Munich, Paris, and Bochum progressively took center stage as independent works of spatial art and quickly created more of a sensation than the theater productions themselves.

Brockmann’s current architectural and spatial works are still marked by the vocabulary of those years and this flair for spatial contexts. For her installations, which sometimes evince grand gestures as well as significant technical and material complexity, the artist uses oversized pictorial fragments, glass panes, colored foils, and mirrors that fundamentally change our perception of spaces, buildings, and urban landscapes.

While serving as a comprehensive introduction to Elisabeth Brockmann’s oeuvre, this catalog also documents her current installation at Dortmund’s Baukunstarchiv NRW, whose atrium she has turned into an immersive colorful experience.