Precarious Form I
09 Sep - 07 Nov 2009
PRECARIOUS FORM I / PREKÄRE SKULPTUREN
The exhibition "Precarious Form I/Prekäre Skulpturen" brings together significant artistic positions exhibiting formal tendencies toward fragmentation, contingency, and decomposition. The twentieth century seems to evince an extreme fragility in a fragmented, rapidly changing, uncertain and nervous time. A world in ruins is posited, with parallel tendencies in artistic processes. These relationships play a crucial role in today's key sculptural positions. One of the main characteristics of precarious sculpture is its inherent ability to rid itself of any formal hierarchy. Signifiers of pop culture are embedded in larger minimalist formal contexts, thereby playing off relationships between aesthetics and materials seemingly in conflict with one another.
The sometimes crude though possible combination of disparate artistic ideologies continues to find expression in the tension between those details that incorporate mass–produced objects or materials on the one hand, and the often seemingly improvised production of the sculptural surfaces by the artist on the other. Even when the objects are large, no monumental effect is intended.
The result is a profoundly humble, radically anti–heroic art, which at times can assume burlesque, carnivalesque traits. From the perspective of constructivism or figuration, for example, sculpture here appears as fragmentary, awkward, precarious form.
The great history of assemblage provides useful support and awareness for the rebirth of sampled forms, mainly because contemporary sculpture has also tended to adapt the method of juxtaposition, rather than composition in the classical sense, as a special compositional approach, so to speak.
The exhibited sculptures and objects, originating in different artistic practices, manifest this coexistence of Object trouvé and artistic intent almost as a travesty, as a wealth of references and allusions that grant admission into other mental worlds, for all intents as sculptures parlantes.
The exhibition "Precarious Form I/Prekäre Skulpturen" brings together significant artistic positions exhibiting formal tendencies toward fragmentation, contingency, and decomposition. The twentieth century seems to evince an extreme fragility in a fragmented, rapidly changing, uncertain and nervous time. A world in ruins is posited, with parallel tendencies in artistic processes. These relationships play a crucial role in today's key sculptural positions. One of the main characteristics of precarious sculpture is its inherent ability to rid itself of any formal hierarchy. Signifiers of pop culture are embedded in larger minimalist formal contexts, thereby playing off relationships between aesthetics and materials seemingly in conflict with one another.
The sometimes crude though possible combination of disparate artistic ideologies continues to find expression in the tension between those details that incorporate mass–produced objects or materials on the one hand, and the often seemingly improvised production of the sculptural surfaces by the artist on the other. Even when the objects are large, no monumental effect is intended.
The result is a profoundly humble, radically anti–heroic art, which at times can assume burlesque, carnivalesque traits. From the perspective of constructivism or figuration, for example, sculpture here appears as fragmentary, awkward, precarious form.
The great history of assemblage provides useful support and awareness for the rebirth of sampled forms, mainly because contemporary sculpture has also tended to adapt the method of juxtaposition, rather than composition in the classical sense, as a special compositional approach, so to speak.
The exhibited sculptures and objects, originating in different artistic practices, manifest this coexistence of Object trouvé and artistic intent almost as a travesty, as a wealth of references and allusions that grant admission into other mental worlds, for all intents as sculptures parlantes.