Annette Streyl

The sculptor Annette Streyl (born in 1968) intertwines the Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s, the German Reichstag and the Galerie der Gegenwart in Hamburg, Ikea in Dortmund and the Palace of the Republic in Berlin. She weaves in the threefold combination of power, material and the market and, tongue in cheek, reduces them to felted objects at a scale of 1:100. Streyl’s sculptures contain a radical curiosity that questions public spaces; this, however, does not prevent them from being highly amusing. She tames great phallic architecture whose totality cannot be contained by our frame of vision at street level; she hangs bank skyscrapers like baggy tracksuit bottoms a washing line and then sets them on ceiling-high pedestals, rendering them invisible. “Buildings that have the purpose of supporting claims to power must never be feminine, cute or sweet; instead they should intimidate” (Streyl).