Conceived by Maria Hahnenkamp in collaboration with Willi Frötscher, this work entitled Ornament-Vorhang (Ornamental Curtain) – five framed glass panels with silkscreen inlays – offers viewers an artistic instrument to view nature. The landscaped nature of a park is segmented into a sequence of frames that follows the movement of an opening ornamental curtain. A variety of different perspectives and through-views unfolds to the viewer in passing. Transparent, white, and semitransparent lines and hatchings of an ornamental drawing based on a model of 1860 overlap in each of the glass panels. These “traces” are indicative of historical and cultural imprints stored in the ornament. Depending on standpoint, the panels can be viewed like frames of a film, individually or as a sequence. In the overlap areas, abstraction comes into view in a twofold sense, since the ornament itself already is an abstraction from nature.

Originally planned as a permanent installation in the Kabelwerkpark in Vienna’s twelfth district, the piece was dismantled in summer 2009 after it had been damaged. An adapted version was installed at the Kurpark Oberlaa in September 2012.