For two years I worked part-time as a guard at the Kunstmuseum Basel. When I had just been hired, the Covid 19 pandemic hit. At the Kunstmuseum, this meant that we were divided into smaller teams, as a so-called "skeleton crew". One guard per floor, I think it was for insurance reasons that we patrolled the closed museum, but I never found out exactly why. As it happened, I was often assigned to the second floor of the old building and was able to spend a lot of time there looking at paintings from the Middle Ages to the late Renaissance. Among other things, I revisited quite frequently the painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb" by Hans Holbein the Younger. There was also a modern sculpture in response to this, a kind of shelf or cabinet, made of dark wood and lined inside with black felt, closed on the front by a large plexiglass panel. This work was in the room next door, but I cannot remember the artist. I found both works to be very "now", they had by no means lost their significance, not only because of the technical execution, the materiality but above all in terms of content.

When Daniel and Ferdinand approached me for the exhibition, I had the idea of making an homage to the painting by Holbein, for Langstrasse, in 2023, lying on display in a former shop window, now an exhibition space in Zurich. What really interested me, next to using the painting as a reference, was the articulated heaviness, the powerlessness, the claustrophobia, and the finiteness, while somehow still being alive through the spectator. Just before completing the oil painting on stainless steel, I had the opportunity to get access to original wood from the Minster Cathedral in Basel through a carpenter friend, Benjamin Furrer, who helped me finish the wooden frame. The glass which which was blown through the steel wound was made by Helena Ťapajnová, both are part of the production studio ASAP Studios in Basel.