Anna Merkenthaler-Harimurti and Annette Merkenthaler
so weiter (“[and] so on”), 2024
The Till Ten Bar is a spatial artwork as well as the venue for Till Ten events organised by the Artistic Advisory Board. The space has been designed by product designer Anna Merkenthaler-Harimurti (1973, living in Freiburg) and artist Annette Merkenthaler (1944, living in Freiburg).
During a discussion on “artistic legacy” between the Artistic Advisory Board and Annette Merkenthaler, the question arose as to whether the artist’s daughter Anna Merkenthaler-Harimurti would continue her mother’s artistic legacy in her work as a product designer. This question provided the impetus for inviting both mother and daughter to re-design the Till Ten Bar together.
Under the title so weiter (“[and] so on”), two generations, two different disciplines, approaches and perspectives engage in an exchange about “passing down” and mutual acceptance. Their approach to the task, which lies somewhere between the fields of art and design, combines functional and artistic elements. An interest in the interaction between the natural and man-made, in metamorphoses and cycles, is woven through Annette Merkenthaler’s artistic practice. Accordingly, she understands an artistic legacy as a living process of releasing and reusing existing works and forms.
Shapes and images of the plant world form the basis for the design, both in reused transparencies from the artist’s earlier works and in objects newly developed by the designer. In this way, processes of recording, recycling and ongoing development create an artistic framework and a new spatial concept for communicative exchange within the Kunstverein’s Till Ten event series.
The design is supported by:
