Exhibiting art outside of museums and galleries is a popular idea.
The inhibition threshold is low when it comes to sculpture gardens, art islands or artificial river meadows, and with a skilful conception, art and nature can interact in such places in a way that a museum can never succeed.
When high-quality pavilion architecture is added to the enjoyment of art, a total work of art is created.
Famous art locations like Hombroich in Germany, Kistefos in Norway or Storm King near New York prove that.
The Waldfrieden in Wuppertal has not yet received the same attention, but only because the mountainous city is rarely on the radar of cultural tourists - wrongly so, as not only an exhibition by the French sculptor Daniel Buren proves, which shows the ensemble of villa, forest and sculpture enriched.
As a prelude to the exhibition trilogy “One Window – Three Artists”, Buren, like later Tatsuo Miyajima and Bettina Pousttchi, had to react to the Jardin artificiel of the Waldfrieden sculpture garden and its architecture.
All three artists make the glass facade of an exhibition hall in the park their artistic starting point.
Buren's colored foil work was applied to the main façade, connecting the exterior with the interior like the stained glass windows in a Gothic cathedral.
Stripes as a trademark
Buren enjoys working in and on architecture, which he applies the slender, vertical stripes found throughout his work.
Buren's trademarks are stripes of different colors applied to a wide variety of materials.
For more than fifty years, he has been sticking his stripes on surfaces, which he "brings to a new appearance through his intervention", as the curators of Waldfrieden hope.
Buren's work entitled "Architecture and Color" will be stuck to the large window front for three months and connect the view of the spring foliage with the interior.
In summer and autumn, two other artists will animate the architecture of the pavilions in Waldfrieden: Miyajima from Ibaraki in Japan uses a field of numbers, while Pousttchi will cover the facade with a photo installation.
The idea of asking three artists to design a facade seems to contradict the concept of a sculpture park, which is about the four-dimensional perception of three-dimensional works.
But for the English sculptor Tony Cragg, who created the Waldfrieden on a slope above Wuppertal, "everything is sculpture, including two-dimensional art".