Since the 1960s Hann Trier was engaged with the design of several large ceiling paintings - among them the ceiling picture in the White Hall of the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin in 1972, three ceiling pictures in the Philosophy Department of the University of Heidelberg, 1979, and a canopy in the central hall of Cologne City Hall's new building in 1980. With their unusual conceptional design they would be the inspiration for further large format and sequential works.

After years of interest in baroque and rococo period ceiling paintings, certain stylistic elements flow into Trier's painting. ''The axially-chiastically-scaled compositions have theoretically no top and bottom, and could, on reconstructing the produc...