With Monika Sosnowska’s project "The Staircase / Die Treppe, 2010", the imposing interior courtyard of the K21 Ständehaus is made available to an artistic intervention for the first time. At two -year intervals beginning in 2010, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will be inviting internationally acclaimed artists to use the “airspace” above the piazza as the site of a contemporary intervention, each designed to heighten awareness of the museum as a “house of art” in the eyes of entering visitors.
Chosen for the first project in the series was Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, born in Ryki in 1972, whose artistic idiom is energized by an enthralling dialogue between art and architecture. As a rule, her works generate tension by suggesting the question: “Already architecture – or still sculpture?” – and vice versa.