Meyer Riegger

Maria Tackmann

23 Nov - 21 Dec 2012

© Maria Tackmann
Am Ende genügt ein Fach, 2012
Installation view Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe
MARIA TACKMANN
Am Ende genügt ein Fach
23 November - 21 December 2012

The materials used in Maria Tackmann’s installations appear neither as raw materials nor as models: They are metaphors for shapes, incarnations of elementary forces, expanding in opposing structural directions - soft, rough, torn. The artist works with found objects, trouvailles, which she gathers from natural as well as cultural environments. In her installation at Meyer Riegger, stones, tree bark and graphite are juxtaposed with wool, glass, cloth and paper. The material directness of the used objects causes them to function as allocations of elements, joined by Tackmann in an individual framework of relation and connection. The unshaped, unshapely, the piecemeal character of the objects, thereby draws them into a spatial system of order. The act of arranging is executed in different steps in her work. On the one hand the artist creates stratifications or groupings of different materials, which are shifted into a new formal structure through their natural shape, or by cuts, folds, fracturing, interweaving, crocheting, knitting, draping. The artist aligns these shape and material fusions in relation to one another in the exhibition space, oriented towards walls, pipes, doorways, pre-existent architectural boundaries and structures. But in Maria Tackmann’s installation at Meyer Riegger the objects are also held together by an internal structure in the room: a line sequence marked with tape on the floor forms a room within the room, almost engenders an interior, which distances and differentiates the objects positioned along the walls from those inside of the demarcation, placing them in a binary system. Inside and outside receive a valency in Tackmann’s installation, since by drawing a physical line on the surface of the floor, divergent places are denoted. The window becomes the benchmark and the pictoral reference within the marked-off field, while the doorways trail an open, mental route in the viewers’ perception. The mental traverse, the tracing of vestiges within space is thus embedded in Maria Tackmann’s installations: coming from the medium of drawing; her work extends into a room, which can not only be visually, but also physically crossed. The objects she unites proceed to exist as metaphors of texture, which the artist - in place of drawing on paper - physically sketches in space, lending her structures colour, form and expression through the specific elaboration of the material.

Christina Irrgang