False Ceiling

In the early 1990s I lived for a while in Berlin. The unusual political moment meant that the most extraordinary combinations of objects would turn up in the flea markets. Only a step away from the assorted military cast offs of the cold war there were two groups of objects which were notable for being so numerous – books and plates. I was struck by the quantity of material and the way that things merged. I can remember the day when I turned over a soup bowl which said ‘Rosenthal 1937’ and below which was an elegant transfer of a swastika. It was this kind of collision between one book and another or between high and low dinnerware which started me thinking about the way we read the world and divide things into different typologies. The making of ‘False Ceiling’ a couple of years later was probably provoked by these kinds of peripatetic experience. You don’t always choose what you get to see.

Richard Wentworth
June 10th 2014

Year: 1995