Simone Westerwinter

Karo Star, 2000/2002

In her works involving checkered patterns, grouped together under the title Erziehung durch Dekoration [Education through Decoration], Simone Westerwinter incorporates patterns from our daily lives in order to investigate the ambivalence of order and disorder. At the same time, she engages with the analogy between visual patterns and patterns in the consciousness. The structures of diamonds and grids seen here represent thought processes. The watercolors from her period of study in Chicago around 1990, painted on found newspaper pages, are among the early examples of this. The juxtaposed pages force a chaos of information into an artistic structure of order. The beauty of the warm, red water-color tones is only superficially harmless. In actual fact they both hide and reveal explosive political and economic information and power situations.