Chemnitz (Lulatsch & Marx) 12.923
Original painting, included in my solo exhibition Slow Creep at Project 78 Gallery.
Acrylic ink and gouache on board
418 x 450mm
2024
In the spring of 2024, I plotted a line of latitude (50.8518) through Project 78 Gallery on the south coast of England and followed it eastward online, creating a route
for a hypothetical circumnavigation—a virtual journey that would yield the imagery from which to make an exhibition. The impossible tour crossed 19 countries and two oceans—traversing cities, agricultural land, wilderness, mountains and lakes while locating multiple sites of cultural production, extractivism, protest, conflict, dispossession, extraterrestrial exploration, leisure and recreation.
Read more at https://jamieatherton.com/slow-creep/
In Chemnitz, the third largest city in Saxony, the line passes beneath Lulatsch, a 302m chimney painted by French artist Daniel Buren in 2013. The stripes, from the ground up, are aquamarine, strawberry red, yellow-green, sky blue, melon yellow, signal violet and traffic yellow. It is the tallest complete work of art in the world. Construction of the chimney was completed in 1984 as part of the development of Heizkraftwerkes Nord II, a brown coal-fired power plant operated by Eins Energie in Sachsen. The power plant ceased operations in January 2024.
In 1953, the first ‘Karl Marx Year,’ the city was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt by the East German government. To mark the occasion, Soviet socialist realist sculptor Lev Kerbel was commissioned to design a monument, a seven meter stylised bust that was inaugurated in 1971 before a 250,000 strong crowd. The Karl Marx bust can still be seen in the city today. On the building immediately behind it, the phrase ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ is written in four languages.
