60 years: Richard Wentworth

For four years I was a student in South Kensington, too young, too inexperienced, to realise how and why it was distinct from other parts of London. In the grimy deprivations of the 1960s city, it was, though, obviously 'different', a rare moment which suggested mainland Europe, the street widths, the wedding cake stucco, a proposal of bourgeois confidence. 
 
I could not have written that fifty years ago amidst the flaking façades of the happy-go-lucky sixties, but I would have certainly known the number of blue plaques and the constant reminders that these were 'intelligent’ streets, a thoughtful cultivated promising place. Nothing quite represents and promotes all of this in quite the way the Goethe-Institut does, now a persistent association for me of somewhere 'making things happen’.
 
In retrospect, it's extraordinary to retain this strength of feeling about any cultural organism, and I would want to emphasise the constancy of my respect for the Goethe-Institut across these decades. How admirable is this quality of endeavour at the Goethe-Institut, year after year against a background of the sliding tiles of the European puzzle?
 
Needless to say, the artist who is writing this has been a frequent guest in Germany, a man with a British passport, intensely proud to be a European.
 
Thank you, Goethe-Institut!


Richard Wentworth is a British artist, curator and teacher.