Clemens Botho Goldbach

  • Billboards, silk-screen plates, wood
  • 392 x 224 x 100 cm
  • 352 x 176 x 100 cm
  • Courtesy of the artist

When creating the euro, not to highlight one country over another, it was decided to draw fictional buildings retracing the history of architecture in Europe. Thus the 5 euro banknotes represent the classical style, the 10 notes, the Romanesque style, the 20 notes, the Gothic, the 50 notes, the renaissance style, the 100 notes, the baroque and the rococco, the banknotes 200, art nouveau and 500 bills, modern and contemporary architecture.

These fictional architectures, Clemens Botho Goldbach builds them. In Melle, he presents the buildings of the new 50 euro banknotes, put into circulation in December 2017. These buildings are not finished. They are in the works such as the euro currency, which is constantly changing in value but also in representation: the 500 euro banknotes are no longer published to fight against corruption.

EURUIN 50 EUR NEU is therefore a monument to the euro but a monument that highlights rather the fragility and the possible decline than the size of this economic utopia.

Everyday from 10am to 6pm

Rue du Pont Saint-Hilaire, 79500 Melle


photo artiste Clemens Botho Goldbach

The works of Clemens Botho Goldbach conceptualize the space that surrounds them: expansive sculptures, mostly pieces of architecture, though sometimes things of natural origin; site-specific and yet never without universal relevance. Everything we see is what it actually is: a tree trunk is a tree trunk, an aerated concrete block is an aerated concrete block, a concrete shuttering element is a concrete shuttering element, historical bricks are historical bricks, and a brick wall is a real brick wall, built in situ to the scale of 1:1. But everything we see is in fact more than what we actually perceive through our senses. It is not just that the objects are not autonomous in relation to their physical surroundings, but Clemens Goldbach also imbues them with a representational function. In other words, they also embrace the history of the locality with all its diversity of exemplary incidents and intellectual and cultural references, at the same time upholding their relevance for our present day. To this end the artist accompanies the sculptural elements of each installation with a paratext that takes a diversity of forms.

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