2022

auf Anfrage zugänglich

Haus für Kinder in der Engelbertstraße 9b, 81241 München

Betonrelief und Wandmalerei, 34 m x 2,40 m

Architecture: macro Architekten

Landscape architecture: grünhoch4

Photos: Boris Storz

Text: Roberta De Righi

A closeup of flowers, grasses, and insects, seen from the perspective of a frog in the midst of a meadow, is a picture book classic. It provides the ideal backdrop for a great many stories about animals. With her large mural on the exterior of the daycare center on Engelbertstraße, “Am Wiesengrund” / “In the Meadowlands”, the Munich-based artist also created a kind of natural setting, an open play area that becomes a stage for kindergarteners.

Nature in all of its diversity plays a significant role in Döscher’s work. At the Haus für Kinder, which abuts the city park and the river Würm, her artwork is a direct response to the idyllic site. The souterrain beneath the building on stilts opens up on the garden and park on three sides. The slightly hilly ground slopes toward the wall and is covered in green granulated rubber.

The artist created a design for the twenty-meter-wide main wall, along with the two pendentives on the sides. To do so, she first shaped flat, sunken reliefs out of concrete, combining it with a large mural in brilliant colors. For the oversized motif, she chose stylized outlines of grasses and flowers, butterflies and bats. This individual element can also be found in the center’s entrance area.

The painting in turn is composed of strongly abstract flowers and curving green and light blue planes indicating a landscape along a lake. A distinctive treasure, however, can only be discovered by taking a careful look: along the lower edge of each side are small, glittering mosaics that invite touch—and give wings to the imagination: It must have been a very special mole that dug up that sparkling gold hill.

Heike Döscher’s public work of art not only offers a puzzle picture for small explorers, but her meadow panorama also opens up the space to its surroundings and the imaginative stories of children immersed in play.