weich mittel hart (soft medium hard)
Meuser. Anselm Reyle. Katja Strunz. Gabriel Vormstein
19 September – 5 November 2013
Weich mittel hart (soft medium hard) proposes a rupture in the recurring formal similarity presumed when joining together artists and their work in an exhibition. While with no intention to create a pseudo historical dialogue, this show brings together the work of Meuser, Anselm Reyle, Katja Strunz and Gabriel Vormstein.
Specific pieces by each artist, using an array of different materials, create alternative routes between sculpturesque and picturesque destinations. Spectators are presented with murals, groupings of pieces, reliefs, free-standing figures and variations on furniture. The associations composed range from formal to materialistic or functional to merely festive and pensive.
On this occasion, the connection which links our four artists together is the Kunstakademie in Karlsruhe, where all of them have either been professors or students. The present exhibition shows a rich display of feelings produced by the fortuitous encounter of materials, attributes and textures. Wood, steel, lead, tree branches, newspapers, bronze, chrome and foil come together here, showing us Reyle’s exuberance,
Strunz’s sobriety, Meuser’s coarseness or Vormstein’s porosity.
Through forging, steel and rust, rough surfaces and brutish assemblies, Meuser (*1947) refers to a historical school of sculpture with its origins most likely in Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro or David Smith. He has been a student of Joseph Beuys, a contemporary of figures like Martin Kippenberger, Palermo or Imi Knoebel and a professor at the Academy in Karlsruhe. And so it is that Meuser’s sculpture personifies the conversion of volume and massive concentration of material into lightness, humor and poetry.
With his own review of twentieth century art, Anselm Reyle (*1970) has built a formal apparatus that promotes an interpretation of abstraction from the perspective of Pop production. Merging the type of gestural abstraction which arose during the second half of the twentieth century with visual mechanisms from popular culture and mass culture entails a profound transgression of our recent critical standards. The theoretical dimension, the intellectual process and the discourse of abstraction, with its nearly spiritual nature, reinforced by theories of informality, brilliantly combine with the shiny, kitsch-looking sculptural icons from pop and mass culture.
On the other hand, Katja Strunz’s (*1974) works could be described as sculptural objects and collages based on a formal language such as Proun, Suprematism or Minimalism. Their purpose would be to suggest the rupture of predominance, thereby creating alterations in the classic method of constructivist compositions. But
Strunz’s work is not just a review of form and material. It forms part of his strategy to enunciate and make visible time, history and space.
Finally, Gabriel Vormstein’s (*1974) artwork questions the value of fleetingness. The idea of a finite nature becomes visible and tangible through the precariousness of the ephemeral and transitory materials used by the artist. The surface where he produces his images converts the space into a bodily thing, focusing on a game of boarders between abstractness and figurativeness that refers to common motives and places of culture and art, Povera, symbolism, romantic and modernist gestures, Klimt or Egon Schiele. Thus he generates a story of juxtaposed sequences on newspaper backgrounds which classify tales and times that are occasionally slippery, fragile and complex.
In short, weich mittel hart and its historicist and emotional view recreate, through irony, the pathos of contemporary art.