Does Felix Semmelroth already know about it?

That his idea, which is as charming as it is downright silly, is obviously not going to work out after all?

It may be that the head of the Frankfurt cultural department at the time was not that serious anyway when he recommended that Adrian Williams apply for the position of Sachsenhausen fountain queen.

Or as a Frankfurt carnival princess.

By the experience!

By no means did he mean the 1822 art prize that he presented to the American artist on that day eleven years ago in the Kaisersaal of the Römer.

But her youthful commitment as the Rose Queen in Portland, Oregon.

Christopher Schutte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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An experience that she, as Williams now recapitulates, around 25 years later - after her studies with Hans Haacke in New York and after graduating from the Städelschule - taught her one thing above all: "How much we as a society value fiction." the artist, born in 1979, saw grown men cry when she solemnly made them knights of her Order of the Roses, which had fallen out of time.

Basically, Williams is all about that in her very different works, built from text and voice, image and sound and taking form in videos and audio plays, short stories, photo-text works and performances: telling stories.

And what they do to us.

With a young student like she once was who came to Frankfurt from New York for a semester.

And then stayed a little longer.

And now, with her husband, the painter Michael Pfrommer, and their three daughters, she's going back to where it all began: to Portland, Oregon, where her parents live.

An adventure, no question, when, after more than 20 years in Germany, they pack up "art, books, records and stuffed animals" to ship their household to the west coast of the United States.

Everything else should stay where it is.

Will be given away or, as Williams puts it, “goes back on the street”, where some of the furniture comes from anyway.

"In the other home," says Pfrommer, everything is there.

Both are artistically at home in Europe

First of all, everything is new.

And different.

Which can hardly remain without consequences for one's own work.

Because even though both are well networked, Williams only recently taught in Havard after a deputy professorship in Mainz and has known the Portland family well after all these years: Williams and Pfrommer are artistically at home mainly in Europe.

This applies not only to the artist couple's long list of exhibitions, which includes museums, galleries and art associations throughout Germany;

or to the collections such as that of the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, in which both are prominently represented.

It also applies to the form of associative and fragmentary narration, which characterizes both Williams' work and Michael Pfrommer's paintings.