When Woody Allen telephoned Cosima von Bonin at her home in Cologne, the call was diverted to her studio where she was working on her project relax it's only a ghost for Documenta 12 (Kassel 2007). She was very excited to hear from him since they hadn't spoken since 2003.
The two first met in 1995 when von Bonin was exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art, Syros (MOMAS)* - an art gallery launched two years earlier by Martin Kippenberger on the Greek island. Allen was a close friend of Kippenberger's and an admirer of his inexhaustibly creative mind. At the time, Allen was scouting locations for his 1995 film Mighty Aphrodite. Although this was a typical 90s-era Manhattan movie, Allen wanted to film a Greek chorus among authentic Greek ruins - which he eventually did, but elsewhere.
In the years following that meeting Allen kept close track of von Bonin's career and, to her surprise, went to see her 2003 solo show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, where he bought an oversized fabric mushroom titled Therapy (#71).
Allen, direct as usual over the phone, invited von Bonin to be art director of his 2008 movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Although the artist was booked solid for the next two years, this was an offer she couldn't refuse.
- Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at the age of 43, was director and curator of MOMAS, which he founded in 1993 in an abandoned concrete cellar on the Greek island of Syros. Many significant international artists including von Bonin had solo shows there.