Pudelkönigin der Nacht

At the center of Gert Kiermeyer's work, we see a stage. It is filled with four individual poodle figures, a pair of yellow poodles, four black poodles on wheels, and a colorful row of smaller poodle figures strung together. If we recall the title of the work, we can see the inexorably birthing (poodle) Queen of the Night on the right, hanging down from a woven hanging basket of indoor flowers. On the left, the black Monostatos watches over the scene from a red beach ball. At the front of the stage, Tamino sings to the image of Pamina. Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, staged here with poodle figures from the collection Evidence of Settlement. The stage is framed by the proscenium, a patchwork surface made of tablecloths, nets, ties, carrier bags with product advertising, and a little dress made of peg bags. As a theater photographer who is constantly confronted with stage sets, Gert Kiermeyer quickly clarified for himself the question of how to deal with the collection in formal terms. Kiermeyer will build a stage himself, and he wants to stage a production on it. While searching for possible characters, he found a large number of poodles of various sizes in the collection, in addition to individual dolls and small teddy bears. Amazed and fascinated by the many poodle figures and their variety of shapes, Kiermeyer began to research. Why does the poodle outshine every other species in the collection? In an interview with Dr. Axel Rudolph, breeding judge chairman of the VDP (Verband der Pudelfreunde Deutschland e.V., German Poodle Association) and last chairman of the breeding committee for poodles in the GDR, data on the development of the poodle population in the GDR is also mentioned. Rudolph states that the population grew steadily in both German states at the beginning of the 1970s, but peaked in the GDR as early as 1980. It may have been a coincidence that Rudolph himself lived in Halle-Neustadt at that time. Much more interesting, however, is the fact that the poodle population rose and fell in parallel with the dynamics of the construction of Halle-Neustadt (1964 to the early 1980s). This connection could explain the frequency of the poodle figure in the Halle-Neustadt Everyday Culture Collection and allow the poodle to be interpreted as an accessory of modernity. Gert Kiermeyer has brought the poodle to the stage for further consideration and examination, where it stands in golden light: the ‘plastic king of animals’.