Gray canyons, brown balconies, orange awnings, small windows, 19 stories, surrounded by fields. High-rise housing estate, Ankerstrasse, Mülldorf, Sankt Augustin in North Rhine-Westphalia. Around 2.200 inhabitants live on 0.61 square kilometers. In Sankt Augustin, it is the neighborhood with the highest proportion of people living below the subsistence minimum, people with a migration background, living below the subsistence level, the second highest proportion of households with children and an above-average proportion of single parents. For Mathias Weinfurter, Ankerstrasse is a nostalgic place and a playground for adventure. The artist spent his childhood in this melting pot of accumulation in the 1990s. It is a central place of his biography as it is for countless other inhabitants. It is a place of life paths and life decisions, of individuals coping with everyday life living under a collective roof — a place where life appears structurally precarious.

In the exhibition Ankerstraße, the place — as it is and was the plot of countless individual life paths and stations — is interwoven with analysis, which is reflected in the clear geometric and sober form of the works. This gives rise to works that seem nostalgic, but more than that, reveal structures in which the aesthetic quality is composed from a place of longing and contemplation.

Text by Alexander Pütz