Lantz'scher Skulpturenpark - Borrowed Scenery

"Before the landscape can ever become a refuge for the senses, it is already the work of the mind. Its scenery is composed as much of layers of memory as of layers of rock," writes historian Simon Schama. Recognizing that our built environment is shaped as much by immaterial forces as by solid materials, the Borrowed Scenery exhibition focuses on the idea of Lantz's park as a constructed space that carries historical narratives and social dynamics across time.

The term "Borrowed Scenery" ( shakkei in Japanese), which originates from Japanese garden design, refers to the deliberate framing and inclusion of the surrounding landscape features in the design of a garden. In the case of Lantz's park, this also includes the past. Built on the foundations of a 13th century manor house and characterized by successive interventions that reflect historical upheavals of political systems and cultural narratives, the park is today a constructed landscape in which past and present intertwine and overlap. In the 19.

In the 19th century, during the Prussian era, the Lantz family, who had become wealthy through the colonial spice trade, acquired the site and had today's Villa Lantz built. In 1858, the family commissioned the landscape architect Joseph Clemens Weyhe to design an English landscape garden around the house. Weyhe, a member of an extended family of landscape architects who designed parks throughout the Rhineland and in Berlin, also serves as a link to the project's second exhibition venue: the showcase in the Hentrichhaus of the Künstlerverein Malkasten, whose garden - as well as the neighboring Hofgarten - was co-designed by the Weyhe family. This creates a historical and spatial axis through the city for the exhibition.

Around one hundred years after the creation of Lantz'scher Park, a bunker was built under the site during the Second World War, the dilapidated entrance to which is still visible today. The idea for Lantz'schen Skulpturenpark and the exhibition of contemporary art in this charged landscape goes back to the Düsseldorf avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Schmela, who opened his eponymous gallery in Lantz'schen Park in 1975 and also lived and worked in Villa Lantz in the heart of the park.

In the context of Lantz's sculpture park, the original concept of "borrowed landscape" goes beyond the visual and also encompasses historical, material and sensual dimensions. For all these partly concealed histories, changing forces and their traces continue to shape the park's terrain - even if they exist only as echoes, fragments and superimposed remnants of spatial arrangements that shape our perception. Borrowed Scenery aims to uncover these interdependencies and at the same time inscribe new perspectives into the complex relationship between preservation, erasure and reinterpretation. The invited artists engage with the latent forces embedded in the landscape - a psychic terrain that is shaped as much by memory as it is by the paths running through the park, the towering trees, strategically placed ornamental rocks and historical sculptures.