Simone Decker (b. 1968, Esch-sur-Alzette) is well known in Luxembourg for several personal exhibitions at the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, and for her participation in 1999 in the 48th Venice Biennale, as part of the Luxembourg pavilion. Her works most often take the architectural context as a point of departure, as well as the institutional context in which she is invited to intervene. One aspect of her approach consists of staging interventions on particular spaces by means of photography. This is the case, for example, in her series of sculptures in chewing-gum realised in the streets of Venice, using a system of trompe l’œil as simple as it is cunning (Chewing in Venice).

The installation Untermieter (1996) by Simone Decker was originally created for an exhibition at the former Galerie Beaumont, which was situated in the rue Beaumont in Luxembourg City. Decker painted the walls, floor and ceiling of one of the gallery's rooms with red latex, and then peeled off the resulting membrane once it was dry. This was subsequently installed in an adjacent room, creating what the artist calls 'a space within a space'. Space and mobility are important concerns within Decker's oeuvre, and Untermieter is no exception. Conceived as a portable object Untermieter can be folded, transported and shown outside of its original context, which, for Decker, is a conceptual as well as a practical concern. The German word Untermieter, which translates as 'subtenant' in English, refers to an occupation of a space that is often temporary and arranged outside of a legal contract, and thus can be seen to refer to the somewhat precarious status of the object. The artist has described the installation as an autonomous work that yet retains traces of its original location, and is thus shaped by a relationship of 'dependence/independence'.