Andrea Tippel – Klausnerinnenstück

The title of Andrea Tippel’s Klausnerinnenstück (1995) alludes to the lay orders of Beguines or Klausnerinnen (anchoresses) that emerged in late medieval Europe. Their ideals corresponded essentially to those of the officially recognised religious orders. They strove for poverty, asceticism and a pious way of life marked by virtue and charity. The Klause, or hermitage, was a place of retreat and devotion. The artist as a hermit, the studio as an inclusorium.

Attached to a window, Tippel’s poem-object in the form of a stencil from which the word ‘Welt’ (world) is cut out is a meditation on the relationship between inside and outside, between the outer and the inner world, between insight, outlook and foresight – in short, on knowledge.