Transport hubs are full of signs, validated by their graphic style and production values, which we read almost subliminally. Die große Geste first appeared in a railway station in Zurich – three slogans accompanied by circles, stars, and squares, saying things such as »places for art,« »role for art,« or »important visual and emotional reference point.« Although rendered in the artist’s handwriting, these personalized signs were integrated within the station’s architecture, slyly questioning the trust we place in lacquered aluminum, and what we want from public art. 

Scheduled to reappear on a larger scale as a permanent installation in Vienna, at the new Donauspital U-Bahn station, the project’s starting point had in fact been an invitation to propose a site specific work for the new airport in Berlin. Jankowski received a dossier of instructions from a private company commissioning art for the airport, complete with simulations of the interiors and graphics pointing out ideas and dimensions for the kind of art they wanted – including, in the entrance hall, a big red square marking the place for what they envisaged as »the grand gesture.« Jankowski’s scaling-up of these ideas literalizes the demands placed on public art, playing on the slippage between the requirements of officialdom and the emotions to be mined from transitional spaces.