Arp Anthracite Triangle

In 2009, the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck hosted a retrospective of the American artist Peter Hutchinson’s work: Erträumte Paradiese (Dreamed Paradises). Encompassing the entire spectrum of his artistic creativity – photo collages, drawings, paintings, sculptures, films, and texts written by him – this review of his work enlivened the exhibition floor in Richard Meier’s new building. Peter Hutchinson’s works make him one of the first ecological aesthetes. Drawing on the tradition of Land Art, the artist focused his attention on and within nature as a higher-level living environment, which he designed through an intense examination and understanding and thus raised it into our consciousness.

The starting point for the exhibition was Hutchinson’s largest planting work, Thrown Ropes Remagen, which in 2001 was one of the first works to be realised as part of the Riverside Sculpture Park project in Remagen. The collage Arp Thrown Rope has been in the collection of the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck ever since. In keeping with Richard Meier’s basic philosophy of creating a dialogue between inside and outside, between architecture and nature, Hutchinson carried out an outdoor work on the grounds of the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck. This was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Society of Friends and Patrons of the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck.

His 1970 work Apple Triangle, for example, a large-scale Land Art project in the context of his Paricutín project in New Mexico (USA), was carried out in the style of his Triangles group of works from the 1970s and ’80s.

For Rolandseck, the artist created an isosceles triangle with a border of white Carrara marble and filled with anthracite coal. Here, his artistic interest lay not only in revisiting the triangular shape of his Land Art works, but also in the colour contrast between black and white and the contrasting materials of organic substances (anthracite coal) and inorganic substances (marble). Last but not least, Hutchinson’s work picks up on the geometric form and white colour scheme as design features of Richard Meier's museum building.

Outdoor area, new building by Richard Meier

Peter Hutchinson (born 1930 in London – died 2025 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA)
Arp Anthracite Triangle, 2009
White Carrara marble and anthracite coal
4.20 x 5 x 5 m
With the generous support of the Society of Friends and Patrons of the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck (2009)