Golden Cut (Der goldene Schnitt)
1987

In “Golden Ratio,” I examined the act of a psychotic perpetrator who slashed Rembrandt’s The Night Watch with a kitchen knife in the Van Rijn Museum in Amsterdam. The weapon was an ordinary knife, the kind found in thousands of households. The police photo of the weapon also included a scale.

For the lengths of the handle (G) and the blade (K), I found the following equation to hold true:
K : G = (K + G) : K

The attacker’s knife was proportioned according to the golden ratio.

In a series of works in 1989, I engaged with theory and practice of painting. I bought old paintings from second-hand dealers and transformed them into sculptural objects.