Homes for German Sculpture is a group of photographs and sculptures made for and in response to Ideal City – Invisible Cities (curated by Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter), shown in Zamość, Poland, and Potsdam, Germany, in the summer of 2006. The photographs (Park Map: Schlosspark Sanssouci) were taken during a walk through Schlosspark Sanssouci in Potsdam in early spring, when the neoclassical sculptures of Frederick the Great’s former summer palace had just been uncovered after spending the winter housed in their own wooden, gable-roofed protective structures. The dismantled panels of those structures were stacked in front of the sculptures they had enclosed, and each photograph foregrounds the stacks as though they were sculptural interventions. Installed as a grid, the photographs replicate the sequence of the walk, read from left to right and top to bottom.
The sculptures reproduce two of the winter houses at the scale of portrait sculpture on pedestals: one tall and narrow, the other composed of three low horizontal modules. Their titles, Cape Cod and Ranch Three Times, are drawn from Dan Graham’s Homes for America, originally published in Arts Magazine (December 1966–January 1967), in which Graham describes the standardized suburban development house as a lightly constructed “shell” assembled from a box or series of boxes — naming the box with a sharply oblique roof a “Cape Cod” and the box longer than it is wide a “ranch.”
