Jewelry

Fall of the Angels [Engelsturz] (2019)

by Werner Koch (*1937)
Gift from the artist to the Liebfrauen Cultural Church

'Fall of the Angels' behind the altar, columns of the baldacchino in the church chancel

Traditional, religiously shaped concepts and images of angels have become rarer. One encounters angels in everyday metaphorical speech, right down to the 'Guardian angel of insurance' advertising, or trivialized as Christmas decorations and grave ornaments

Against this background, Werner Koch ventured into a work on angels in 2019. It was part of his exhibition 'SchriftBilder' ['Script Pictures']) at the Liebfrauenkirche in the summer of 2019.

On the dark choir wall behind the altar of the 1958 Expo, 12 figures are attached, beings made of wood, cardboard, paper, and acrylic, depicted in black and white with rough outlines. Human bodies, arms, legs, heads, and line of sight are only indicated, as are faces, clothing, and headwear. They hang upside down on the wall, three groups of four figures, overlapping one another. It is always the same type—reduced to contours, made of simple material, with little individualization.

The installation creates a new backdrop for the Brussels altar consisting of the altar table, cross, and canopy. As you walk toward the chancel, the figures begin to move: they shift within the frame formed by the supports of the baldachin, and they seem to plunge down from the black-and-silver sky in the dome of the baldachin.

Koch has depicted beings like these in ever-new variations since a stay in New York in the 1990s: people from the proverbial lonely crowd of the modern world, everyday figures in the urban jungle, in the unfathomable universe—or even in a church interior: they had already been set up in the Hameln Minster of St. Boniface for Expo 2000 in his installation 'Emptiness?' ['Leere?'].

Installation 'Emptiness?' ['Leere?'] in St. Boniface Church, Hameln

Regardless of the title 'Fall of the Angels', there is much to be said for associating Koch's installation with a particular tradition, one marked by imagery such as Peter Paul Rubens's 'Fall of the Damned'.

Peter-Paul Rubens, The Fall of the Damned, ca. 1620 (detail)

Unlike Rubens’s depiction of the punishment of the damned—whose fall from the heavenly to the hellish sphere is portrayed in striking contrasts of color and light—Koch’s 'Fall of the Angels' shows only human figures plunging downward in black, gray, and white. Hell is not in the picture, nor is heaven..

Yet, the traditional title 'Fall of the Angels' has remained—as a worldly label for what is happening to people here: mass downfalls. Human hubris may thus be seen in this fall of the angels, massive and wholesale misjudgments, a failure to meet god-high demands.

Koch’s installation corresponds to the old altar of the Church of Our Lady. His twelve figures fall – now, once again, like Rubens’s the Damned – down from the canopy’s heaven, from a universe that the artist of the 1958 Expo depicted as harmonious, with the twelve12 signs of the zodiac on the silver firmament, the twelve apostles, with Christ as ruler of the world, all crafted in fine materials.

So, the artist's critical gaze is directed not only at everyday people falling again and again, but certainly also at a religious view of the world perceived as euphemistic and arrogant.

References:
Paus, Ansgar, et al.: article „Angel“, in: LThK, Bd. 3, Freiburg: Herder 2006 (=31995), p. 646-655.
Reichling, Philipp: Fragen zur christlichen Existenz in ausgesuchten Werken von Werner Koch, in: Blanchebarbe, Ursula (Ed.): Werner Koch: Retrospektive; 1956 - 2012 [Exhibitions marking the 75th birthday of Werner Koch]. Kerber-Verlag, Bielefeld/Berlin 2012, p. 173-176.
Reichling, Philipp: Lecture for the opening of the benefit exhibition 'SchriftBilder' [WrittenImages} by Werner Koch at the Liebfrauen Culture Church, Duisburg, 2019 (typescript)
https://www.wernerkoch.com/installationen/index.html (retrieved April 25th, 2023)