Harald Erath: Monuments of Durability

The exhibition "Monument of Durability" by Harald Erath takes place in the Kornhäuschen (Grain cottage) and in the glass house of the Arkadenhof. The artist stages a ritual of transformation that oscillates between death, preservation and the longing for immortality.

His materials are not sublime, but everyday: meat, bacon, polystyrene, brine. Yet it is precisely in the banal that the mythical opens up, the question of how bodies and food enter the cycle of life and how memory takes shape in the material.

In a pavilion: an aquarium filled with brine and heavy pieces of raw pork belly. Here, the process of preservation becomes an allegory of redemption, from death to preservation, from finiteness to permanence. Food that is otherwise consumed and forgotten becomes an icon of the cycle, inscribed in the dream of immortality through our consumption.

Opposite: A refrigerator containing a polystyrene cone larded with bacon, which produces crystalline sputum, a paradoxical monument in which preservation and decay are inextricably intertwined.

Finally, the steaming stepped pyramid of red meat crates rises in the glass house of the arcade courtyard. It is both a monument and ritual architecture, a cipher for origin and memory, at the same time symbolising the human struggle for permanence, elevation and transcendence over transience. The fog that fills the room transforms the scenery into a kind of cathedral of the profane, in which meat crates become relics of a society that seeks to overcome its own mortality through consumption and preservation.

Erath's work is both a meditation and a critique. It reveals the extent to which our striving for permanence, purity and immortality is rooted in the material and how fragile the monuments we erect are.

Harald Erath (born 1984 in Singen am Hohentwiel) studied painting at the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts and stage and costume design at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art. He now lives and works in Zurich. His works, which range between painting and installation, combine late medieval iconography with questions of identity, visibility and perception.

Last edited on 17.11.2025