into a painterly design on wallpaper engulfing the space and reminiscent of Matisse works. Already then she was working with the cutout technique, which she also made use of in her series of playing card Damen (Queens) simultaneously presented at the gallery. The sky-blue material from which the work Camouflage was produced and in whose amorphous apertures the white gallery wall shone through, consisted of plastic trash bags which the artist had placed on the wall in precise strips.

Apart from the notion that plastic per se, as Roland Barthes pithily put it in his famous Mythologies (1957), represents "essentially an alchemical substance,"(2) in the artistic transformation process the magic of alchemy goes still further: Sabine MohrÕs reinterpretation of a profane cigarette pack design and a no less profane material through artistic appropriation and metamorphosis not only ennobles the banal everyday phenomenon, but also gives it a totally new aesthetic form. Here the gulf between Matisse and trash bags Ð "high" and "low" Ð is overcome in a playfully light manner, and the secret beauty of the "banal" is dis-covered. Or, to speak with Paul VirilioÕs concluding remarks on MagritteÕs approach: "Regarding what one would not regard, hearing what one would not hear, paying attention to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary. To deny the ideal hierarchy between what is decisive and what is anecdotal, as there is no such thing as the anecdotal; there are only ruling cultures exiling us from ourselves and from the others..."(3)

The dis-covery, in the sense of both a disclosure of hidden or unrecognized aspects of an object and in the sense of finding and investigating undiscovered terrain Ð and the specific contemplation of and attention to what would otherwise not necessarily be regarded or would elude the attention as "banal" - is a consistent cognitive principle of the artist. In an almost literal

manner she pursued this principle in the series mentioned above, where she simultaneously placed a focus upon the eloquent front illustrations and on the usually ignored, concealing reverse sides of playing cards, in this case of the four queens. The particular appeal of the deck of cards consists for Sabine Mohr in the fact that this is a common property of everyday life with hidden aesthetic layers, which she reveals through her transformative alchemical methods. In her playing cards enlarged to wall pictures, partially realized in the shape of filigree cutouts, partially sprayed on the surface via (cutout) stencils, she emphasizes the dialectics or duality which in multiple ways is contained in the object. The viewers are sensitized for the mysterious, dichotomic elements of playing cards: the mirror images of the figures on the front of the cards, die interdependency of "positive" and "negative", "dayside" and "nightside", "matrix" and "imprint." The graceful beauty of the Queens is countered by the arabesques on the back of the cards with their stylized tendrils, leaves, and other ornamental interlacings. In enhancing the presence of the concealing Ð and usually concealed, because unnoticed Ð reverse sides of the cards the artist lends their elaborate ornamental composition a significance of its own. As also in other

The mental journeys between present, past and future, to which her works as launching pads for the imagination stimulate the viewer, lead up to the distant expanses of outer space. In her installation MONDFahrt (Journey to the Moon) for the Munich Hotel Olympic in 2003, for example, a moon globe split into