Artists have always been inspired by the colours of the sky, from the blue that deepens as it is framed by clouds, to the reds and yellows that, depending on the sunlight, extend the spectrum of blue. Landscape painting is one of the most important genres of 19th century painting. The Albertinum has a large collection of landscape paintings. They mainly depict regions in Saxony and Italy. The sky often competes with historical sites, other tourist attractions or small genre-like narratives. Clouds and blue air arch over the scene like an aura.
This colour has a strange and almost inexpressible effect on the eye. As a colour it is an energy; but it is on the negative side and in its highest purity it is, as it were, a charming nothingness. There is something contradictory of charm and tranquility in the sight.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
In Romanticism, the limitless space of the sky symbolises the longing for freedom in a time of upheaval and political and social repression. At the same time, however, the sky opens up a great emotional space in painting and appears as a value in its own right: in its gradations and variations of colour, as well as in the amorphous forms of the clouds, painters are also experimenting with a freedom of art that leads to abstraction in 20th century art.
Roni Horn's glass body "Deeps and Skies" dated 1995/96 from the Schenkung Sammlung Hoffmann shows this tension between the limited dimensions of the sculptural block and the dissolution of boundaries through the blue colour, which is further enhanced by the transparency and reflection of the material. In the context of 19th-century landscape painting, her work becomes a contemporary counterpart, revealing comparable considerations in dialogue and yet confronts the positions of the paintings in a rather independent way.
