Façades is the title of the exhibition which the current recipient of the Bonn Art Award, Eva Berendes, is realizing at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in both interior and exterior spaces. At the same time, however, Façades is the name for the new group of works, expressly created for the current presentation, which on the one hand respond to the architecture of the institution and the specific site of a “museum,” and on the other hand engage in artistic reflection upon an abstract mode of painting that extends into space.

Set up both in the forecourt of the museum in front of the large array of windows and in the exhibition space behind, the works focus on the actual transition between these areas and thereby also mark their differing functions. Thus the positioning of viewers in front of and between the works serves, in both a literal and a figurative sense, to fix the location of the body in space. The perspectival orientation of the gaze is repeatedly readjusted, inasmuch as the “in-between” aspect, which is deliberately maintained in an open state, allows the work to become an ambiguous object. Sometimes it presents itself to the audience as an architectural fragment, i.e. as a façade, or sometimes as a spatial body, i.e. as a work of art. Eva Berendes frequently uses objects and materials from everyday life which she then brings into uncustomary constellations in order to induce an opening of interpretation and to discover new facets in the familiar.

Since 2019 the Bonn Art Award, which is awarded every two years, is additionally supported, thanks to the generosity of the Bonn couple Dr. Stephanie and Wolfgang Bohn, by a working stipend in a foreign country and by a purchase from the exhibition. The research trip attached to the stipend led Eva Berendes to Barcelona, where she investigated the buildings of the well-known Spanish architect Riccardo Bofill.