It seems to be a mixture of disgust and amusement that caused Pavel Schmidt to return, time and again, to adaptations of Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s Venus produced by the industry in kitsch. He blew these kitsch figures up and glued the fragments together with adhesive tape or measuring sticks, or – similar to a vascular system – created connections using plastic tubing filled with wine. In the Giardino the two cannot come together. Placed on railway buffers arranged to form a cross, they gaze in opposite directions, but – as the artist comments with a twinkle in his eye – who knows what happens at night.

Pavel Schmidt’s 5.40-metre high pump is more than simply a delicate sculpture or a graphic accent in the landscape, and it is also more than a joke about the lack of functionality of an object, because the pump handle is so high up that it cannot be reached.

The artist employs the term »water« in his title in eight languages. In the summer, when the grass is scorched and the soil cracks, the pump becomes a symbol for the thirst of humans and of the earth.