About the Work
A onetime pupil of Adolf Hölzel, Kerkovius created her first tapestries during her time at the Bauhaus (1920–1923). It was there that she also began experimenting with form and material. She attained a lively surface texture with the aid of changing thread types and thicknesses—here, for example, with the thick, unspun wool thread forming a kind of frame and the partially visible warp threads. Kerkovius often did not arrive at the final composition until she was in the midst of the work’s realization. Mountains, houses, people, and animals are discernible in this tapestry of reductive, planar forms.
About the Acquisition
The Städel Museum has the photographer, psychotherapist, philanthropist, and long-time Frankfurt resident Ulrike Crespo (1950–2019) to thank for more than ninety works ranging from classical modernism to American pop art. The paintings, drawings, and prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Oskar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Cy Twombly, and others originally belonged to the holdings of her grandfather, the Darmstadt-based industrialist Karl Ströher (1890–1977), who amassed an extensive art collection after World War II.
