«Ab auf die Insel!» (Off to the Island) is about our longing to get away from it all and leave our civilization behind us. Claude Sandoz (*1946) has been visiting the island state of St. Lucia since 1994, where he develops works in large cycles. Inspired by the foreign culture there, by literature and philosophy, Sandoz creates enchanting room-filling works made up of small parts. He interweaves the everyday and the exotic, the cosmic and the figurative. Sandoz’s exuberant work finds a focus in the theme of St. Lucia: with the result that the colours, fauna, flora and materials for his installations are borrowed from that island.

What happens when the familiar and the strange come together, become superimposed, enriched perhaps, by one another? From what point onwards is someone a local? Who is able to travel? What is exoticism, what craft, what art? Does art reproduce a colonial viewpoint? Is wanderlust by its very nature an encroachment? In an annex, artistic positions ranging from modernism to today will critically reflect and contextualise these ambivalences in the history of art.