An Artist's Estate – Questions Instead of Answers

In storage, I routinely turn the pictures over. Sometimes signatures, dates, or my father's notes appear on the back. On this collage, instead, green geometric shapes emerge, along with yellow ornaments, blue plant motifs, and brown checks.

"These are seventies wallpapers," I think.

I know my grandmother's house and studio well. The walls were mostly white. Still, I remember that she kept buying different wallpapers. Only when I turn this collage over does it become clear to me what she might have used them for.

On the back of the work, the printed fronts of the wallpapers are visible. For the actual picture, my grandmother had used the white backs. She tore the papers, turned them to different angles, layered them over one another, and worked their embossed surfaces with paint. The patterns these wallpapers had once been made for disappeared. Their structures remained.

On the front, the papers lie layered over one another in blue, gray, brown, and black. The torn edges recall horizons, shorelines, or geological deposits. A material for interiors has become a landscape.

The collage carries neither a known title nor a confirmed date. The dimensions noted, a number, and the estate stamp on the backing board are mine. They do not belong to the original work, but to the order that forms around it decades later. This, too, the back reveals: the traces of the artist – and the traces of those who, after her death, try to preserve and understand her work.

This collage is not an isolated case. Many backs in the estate are revealing. Some carry signatures or dates, others my father's notes. Still others show materials that are barely identifiable on the front anymore. Certain papers and embossings recur across different groups of works. What at first appears to be a mere reverse side can offer clues to working processes and connections within the body of work.

A wallpaper, however, is not yet a date. A recurring structure can suggest a relationship without proving a chronology. And my memory of my grandmother buying wallpapers does not automatically explain when, or for which works, she used them.

Since the summer of 2023, I have been working through her estate systematically. After my father's death, I had inherited the entire body of artistic work. Between the clearing of the studio and the day I legally became the owner of the estate, thirty-three years had passed.

For many years, the body of work was held in trust because of my father's serious illness. The works were packed, rearranged, and relocated several times. Not everything that seemed secondary at the time survived. Documents, calendars, notebooks, photographs, exhibition posters, and working materials were partly lost.

The works were still there. Part of their history no longer was.

When the art was moved from the house and studio to Cologne, the collection was assessed by an art historian in 2008 and recorded in a list. Today, this early inventory is an important reference document. It preserves information that can no longer be gained from the works alone. But even it cannot explain how the individual works relate to one another.

The estate comprises several thousand works. They were stored in portfolios, picture cabinets, and large boxes. Framed pictures were partly wrapped in bubble wrap. Much had been stowed by size. That makes sense for transport. For understanding a body of work, it helps only to a limited degree.

At first, I thought of the task mainly as a matter of documentation. I began photographing, assigning numbers, and forming categories. My inventory numbers were meant to hold as much information as possible, and for that very reason kept becoming more complicated. I changed the system, started over, and lost track again. Which works had I already photographed? Which were recorded but not yet clearly assigned? What was missing?

I work on the estate alongside a full-time job. Intensive days in storage are sometimes followed by interruptions of weeks. A system of order that only works as long as every step stays in memory is, then, no system of order at all.

The decisive change began not in a database, but in storage. I first had to give the works physical places. The early textile designs came together, as did the textile works, monotypes, paper collages, and mixed-media works. Groups of works were divided into subgroups and then ordered by format, period, and storage location. Shelves, plan cabinets, drawers, and archive boxes were given numbers that are now linked to the digital archive.

Only once works from the same group actually lay together did relationships become clearer. Elements of the early textile designs reappeared in later works. Certain materials migrated through different phases of her practice. Individual objects turned into sequences, variants, and transitions.

The new order created an overview. But it also raised a more difficult question: which connections are inherent in the body of work – and which do I generate by sorting the works in a particular way?

I knew my grandmother's studio and was interested in her art even as a child. I overheard conversations within the family and with artist friends, and I can assign many groups of works from personal familiarity. And yet today I have to distinguish: what do I know from my own memory? What is documented by a work or a record? And what seems plausible to me only since I can see the works side by side?

These questions cannot be resolved with a more precise inventory number.

While I am still trying to understand the inner order of the work, the first exhibition inquiries have already arrived. Seen from outside, the estate appears ready to become visible. In storage, it becomes clear how much remains open. Before initial observations turn into a public narrative, I therefore want to obtain one or two independent art-historical assessments.

On the front of the collage, the torn papers come together into a landscape. On its back, the individual wallpapers remain recognizable. Since I began working on the estate, I have encountered this movement again and again: I establish relationships – and in doing so discover new details that elude the order.

At the beginning, I asked myself how I should document several thousand works. Today the question is a different one: how can what lies before me be placed within art history – and who can help me with that?