Invited to launch of this series is Polish sculptor Monika Sosnowska (*1972).
 
This artist – who received international acclaim most recently for the steel sculpture “1:1,” a spectacular project she installed in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale of 2007 – is predestined for this type of artistic intervention.
 
Sosnowska works with spaces, exploring their characteristic features, their styles, even their psychologies, before commenting on, modifying, or counteracting them via her own forms. She strives to “create atmospheres” in order to discover how spaces and emotions converge and interact.

Monika Sosnowska is highly attuned to the potential of links between elements from the history of architectural modernism and motifs from the socialistera architecture of her native land, familiar to her from direct experience.
 
This artist operates within the force field that conjoins architecture and sculpture, which she brings together with striking intensity and emotional force by means of her minimalist formal idiom.
 
Visitors can look forward to a shrewdly framed encounter between this historical atrium/courtyard and her artistic commentary. Up until its conversion into a museum in 2002, the building which today houses the K21 was a site of political confrontation.
 
Erected by Julius Carl Raschdorff between 1877 and 1880, the Ständehaus was the meeting place of the Provincial Diet, and thereafter the seat of the Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. The building is an outstanding example of the architecture of German Historicism, and is marked by a conspicuous stylistic pluralism. The piazza, already a public square in early times, served as a “parking lot” for the coaches of the district administrators, and remains a much favored gathering place in Düsseldorf.
 
Monika Sosnowska has appended an additional style to the eclecticism of the architecture of the K21 Ständehaus, which takes the form of a winking, yet apparently functional gesture. Her project was inspired by the external staircases often attached to the façades of residential blocks in her home country which are built in the style of Socialist Neoclassicism.
 
As though deposited there by an enormous hand, the staircase – fashioned in black steel and with a red handrail – hangs downward into the foyer, at the same time seeming to reach out a sisterly modernist hand to the stair tower opposite. But Monika Sosnowska would not be Monika Sosnowska if she left things like that: the staircase is also misshapen, and in the upper, overhanging portion, its materiality seems to have been softened, as though it were melting.

Sosnowska sees in art a legitimate critic of architecture, and the latter in turn as reflecting political and societal relations.
 
In this sense, a critique of architecture is a critique of society. Ever since 1989, when communism collapsed in the East, she has regarded the deformation and reshaping of architecture – especially in cities like Warsaw – as exemplary of social transformation.
 
Her staircase is a commentary on both neoclassical architecture and on the demise of utopian modernism – manifested in the East primarily through ideas concerning socialist residential building. Moreover, our construction generates a surrealist echo of de Chirico while at the same time instigating a sober examination of the building’s proportions.