These are flat things and things which are not flat, reflects upon the ideas Richard Artschwager provocatively addressed throughout his practice: the complicated back and forth between object and image, image and object, overtly playful and yet equally profound.
The works of the artists shown often escape clear boundaries, nodding to predecessors and interrogating the potentials, limitations and definitions of sculpture. Though thematically varied, with content both political and personal, the selected works share a powerful commitment to form, addressing material specificity, craftsmanship and the act of making a thing.
ANNETTE LEMIEUX paradoxically uses needle-point to engage with architecture in real scale. A specific, canonical reference– the outline of a door designed by Mies van der Rohe for a villa in Krefeld and first exhibited there, sits alongside a schematic brick wall for a dialectical pairing: Creating an Exit (1994) and Barrier (1995). As with much of Lemieux’s work, a deadpan, precise and emphatic presentation both tenders and belies imaginative, evocative, and political content.
The direct, deadpan engagement with architecture is also evident in Untitled (2014), two works by VIRGINIA OVERTON. By recasting patches of finished and structural wood flooring as wall pieces, Overton’s work employs a robust minimalism and wit while maintaining cultural specificity of salvaged remnants and interventions. For decades DIANE SIMPSON has mined, keen-eyed observations of haberdashery and fashion for sculptural form. Her work Ten Fold (2010) is derived from the forms of an elaborate collar, rushing headlong into a play between planar flatness and depth and of materials, with a body of mottled linoleum.
Cinderella Bambi (2014) by sculptor TAYLOR DAVIS is at once a decorative fringe and a discarded pelt. Carefully hand-inscribed with copper ink on its grey suede surface is a list of the release and re-release dates for the iconic Disney films of the title, the work becoming a weird totem of pop-cultures and psychologically loaded repetition.
The anonymous women of MARLO PASCUAL‘s found-photo-based wall works are enlivened by keen and uncanny sculptural additions. In Untitled (2016) two candles on brass stands are first lit at the precise eye-level of the interrogative, gazing subject. They burn down in real time, all the while charging the photograph as its own mysterious object.
The phone is an etui, both recording and viewing device in ALEXANDRA LEYKAUF‘s 12 Landscapes – Dessauer Strasse (2016). Filmed in various museums, the recorded landscape paintings are animated through slight movement of the artist’s hand, then re-recorded and viewed on the same iPhone screen in the intimate setting of her home. In Field of Rye. Seeland (Laurits Anderson Ring) – Dessauer Strasse (2016) and Meditations by the Sea (Anonymous) (2016), Leykauf also interrogates the framed and complex relationships between original, reproduction and viewer, arriving at collisions of exterior and interior, a layered and reflexive double space.
