Abstract chickens on orange, a radiantly naive fish facing a fanged monster, flower still lifes, caricatures. Oil on canvas, oil on Pavatex, gouache, pencil, coloured print. Max von Moos, Ludwig Weninger, Lucien Mainssieux, Rudolf Muchow, Josef Maria Schröder. And in between, two Mickey Mouses with bare male torsos, signs around their necks asking “Where will you spend eternity?” Having pictures around me is as self-evident and necessary to me as a library is to a writer. Collecting begins in the head. Large parts of my collection and many of my own works hang in ever-changing arrangements on the many walls available to me. Without system and without familiar ordering criteria, a perhaps more unprejudiced view of works and artists opens up. The picture arrangements in this book convey that view: in shifting, intuitive combinations they burst the compulsion toward completeness and categorization of conventional collecting. — Christoph Kappeler