Informed by his existing series of drawings entitled Kadath Fatal, Hennig Bohl developed four large-scale murals for the subway embankment wall along Paltaufgasse in Vienna’s 16th district, whose rough-faced, square-dressed stones are reminiscent of imperial architectural gestures like the rusticated facade of Palazzo Medici in Florence.

Placed, or almost showcased, on the wall, the picture surfaces have something distinctly theatrical about them, with the housing estate across the street from them providing the auditorium. They define a kind of stage space with the street being the fourth wall in this theater.

The titles of the works loosely refer to H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926/27), in which Kadath appears as a mystical place to where the gods have betaken themselves “in the cold waste where no man treads.” The meaning of the drawings, though, is consciously kept unclear. They are merely suggestive of a narration while resisting unequivocal readability. However, this results not only in irritation but also in an openness to individual readings which more targeted roadside billboards would not allow for. Like in an animated cartoon, the sequence of pictures is a succession of similar motifs indicating a kind of filmic progression, which has its counterpart in the cars driving by in the street as viewers. The individual frames of the sequence are overlapped by, or overlap, a stylized photographic replication of the surrounding wall. Set into the wall, the drawings seem to be floating on, or in places submerging in, a sometimes marbled looking background. By replicating the surrounding wall within in the picture, it is included in and negotiated as part of the pictorial reality.