David Renggli | Say Yes: Kunsthalle Recklinghausen

A newly produced artwork by David Renggli is on display on the façade of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen from October 2025 unti Octoberl 2027. With Say Yes (2023/2025), the Swiss artist presents a neon installation that will define the building’s appearance for two years.

Say Yes is a luminous seascape visible from afar. A sunrise—or is it the evening light?—is reflected on the water’s surface, in which the word “Say” can be read in the sky. Curiously, the reflected lettering in the rippling water transforms into a flowing “Yes.” Only through the interplay of lettering and reflection, of light and mirror image, does the entire message become legible. Renggli’s “Say Yes” is a highly visible, colorfully enticing invitation to say “yes” to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and to discover the exhibitions in a museum that has been writing postwar history since 1950 in a former high-rise bunker with windows over ten meters wide in its facade. But it is also a work that engages with the history of advertising slogans and neon lettering, their promises and faded dreams, and, not least, reflects on light and reflection as visual carriers of meaning in art.

Say Yes is part of a series of temporary light artworks on the façade of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, unveiled as part of “Recklinghausen leuchtet.”