Bordüre, 2008 / Erweiterung Intervention 2013

Anyone entering the customer lobby of the Raiffeisen bank in Seuzach feels like they have stepped into the into the Snow Queen's palace. Wherever you look, glass panes glitter like ice, their delicate frosting creating a magical spatial experience.

Using sheaf and rosette designs, Winterthur artist Katharina Henking (* 1957) distorts the view through the large window façades at the branch. Lobes, bays, bridges and islands lend the shapes an informal appearance. The weightlessness of the walls contrasts starkly with the room's solid furnishings and the strong cubic form of the residential and commercial building with its rigid concrete canopy and the dark mosaic cladding of the shop floor. Katharina Henking lays her intervention on the top of the glass panes in solid aluminium window frames, which are individually affixed from the outside. Leaving the upper glass strip unadorned, the design of the lower window section underscores the plinth theme, which is accentuated on the interior by dark wall strips extending as far as the sash bars.

Katharina Henking's "Trims" was inspired by a papercut made of white paper depicting a stylised bouquet of flowers on the floor of a room ("Interieur", 2007, 130 x 150 cm, since 2011 in the art collection of the canton of Zurich). She copied a rectangular detail from the bouquet shown in this work, which differs distinctly from the strict graphic work of that phase, defined by its large surfaces, rigid symmetries and figurative silhouettes. Using black paper, she cut out the pattern by hand and laid it on a white background. She then scanned this motif and enlarged it to the size of the window panes, thereby abstracting the original image. To achieve the high-definition rendering of the picture elements on glass by means of sandblasting, all of the outlines had to be redrawn in advance in the control file and the colour fields filled in completely.

When inserting the window panes into the frame, Katharina Henking played with the double glazing, melding panes of glass with identical subjects in the façade area. By contrast, in the windows enclosing the consulting rooms in the interior, the artist overlapped panes depicting sandblasted reverse images to create visual barriers. Due to the staggered motifs on matt and smooth surfaces, the changing angles of the light project countless patches of light and silhouettes onto the floors and walls as the day goes by.

When the branch was expanded in 2013, six lightboxes were recessed into the corridor walls to atmospherically integrate the first floor. Katharina Henking designed these glass panes with variations on the motifs used in the windows of the bank's lobby area.

Competition/revision/execution 2008

Extension in 2013