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The painting '01:56 above horizon' by artist Toulu Hassani shows the starry sky that she photographed at a specific time. The timelessness and vastness of the cosmos blur the boundaries between past, present and future.

The painting was purchased for the collection of the Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal in 2023 with funds from the Renate and Eberhard Robke Foundation, making it one of the museum's most recent acquisitions. In this first exhibition room, it joins the first painting in the collection, 'Dogs at the Edge of the Forest'.

The wall objects, graphics and paintings by the artist, who was born in Iran in 1984, are always based on a principle of order. These are often geometric or spatial structures that are recognisable and sometimes seemingly tangible, representing the fictive and invisible order beyond the artwork. Hassani lives and works in Hannover, Germany. In her more recent works - such as '01:56 above horizon' - cosmic spaces and astronomical patterns of order dominate.

Primal human questions about space and time, self and infinity are raised when Hassani paints the starry night sky at a specific time - around 1.56 a.m. - and place. She depicts the night sky in several versions, first documented in photographs and then painted. At first glance, the canvas appears to be monochrome. On closer inspection and visual scanning of the surface, nuances of various dark blues and blacks become visible, in which precisely painted white, bluish, yellowish and reddish stars and other celestial bodies - and, pars pro toto, the entire cosmos - appear.

Toulu Hassani's works are subtle, almost poetic approximations of cosmic laws that, despite their seemingly technical and mathematical construction, radiate an unfathomable sensuality and even supernaturalness. Her art can be described as an attempt to grasp the incomprehensible through minimalist clarity and painterly order. Hassani's cosmic works appear abstract, but are in fact a representational attempt to depict the motif of infinity on a finite canvas.