From chemnitz2025.de
"We dream of journeys through space – isn't the universe within us?" wrote Novalis in 1798, and Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student at the Freiberg Mining Academy, in his pan-deistic philosophical work of magical idealism, Blüthenstaub (Petal Dust). Viewers of Rebecca Horn's vertical, multi-part sculpture, The Universe in a Pearl, in the neo-Gothic Hospital Church in Lößnitz, also take a mysterious path into an inner world. Looking into the two-part mirror sculpture lying on the church floor, its upper mirror slowly rotating, a third mirror, located at a height of three meters, opens up a reflective space that extends into infinity. A circular shape of blue light can also be seen in the field of vision, which combines intricately with the viewer's reflection.
The work of artist Rebecca Horn, born in 1944 in Michelstadt, southern Hesse, and deceased in 2024, is reminiscent of a fanned-out technical representation of a machine with three superimposed funnels. In the gap between above and below, the dimensions of Euclidean space dissolve, and the view opens into a paradoxical, seemingly endless echelon of beauty, initiating a dissolution of boundaries.
Created in 2006 by sculptor, installation and performance artist, and filmmaker Rebecca Horn, the sculpture has been repeatedly installed in churches, including in London, Mallorca, Hamburg, and Berlin. Before finding its final home at the Museum Wiesbaden, The Universe in a Pearl will make one last stop in a church: the Hospital Church of St. George, transformed into an art and pilgrimage church, located at a crossroads of the Silberberg and Saxon Ways of St. James on Frankenstrasse.
(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)