Isolde Loock: Henry Lampe

"It is always an adventure to enter a new room; for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion." (Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting)Isolde Loock declares her late friend's apartment as an "objet trouvé", everything remains in its original condition. She invites seven artists to live there for a while in order to get an idea of him, the "portrait of a stranger".In her "portrait of a friend" she uses the photos and estimates of a sworn auctioneer from the inventory of the apartment. She contrasts this mercantile perspective with personal notes and diary entries of the deceased as an imagined self-portrait.