Suse Weber
dal 15/1/2009 al 20/2/2009
Segnalato da
15/1/2009
Suse Weber
Galerie Barbara Weiss (old location), Berlin
Formel:Verein. Her works (in sculpture, sound, installation, theatre and performance) are permeated conceptually and methodologically by a very specific and often radical use of emblems and symmetry, and they reflect on everyday forms of society and socialization.
Galerie Barbara Weiss is pleased to present our first solo show by Suse
Weber, entitled /Formel:Verein/. Weber was born in 1970 in Leipzig, and
works in sculpture, sound, installation, theatre and performance. Her
works are permeated conceptually and methodologically by a very specific
and often radical use of emblems and symmetry, and they reflect on
everyday forms of society and socialization. On the one hand they
present a cultural critique of the social status quo in certain areas,
while they also raise questions pertaining to belonging, identity, and
self-image. When creating her works, Suse Weber uses a combination of
industrially produced raw materials and materials she has made herself.
Her perfect aesthetics make the latter then also resemble industrial
mass production.
In the exhibition /Formel:Verein/ Weber shows a sculptural ensemble that
she created during her scholarship period in Mönchengladbach in 2007,
and first showed at the MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengaldbach. In preparing
the work, she undertook her own “research” in the world of
Mönchengaldbach clubs and societies – in a town which is renowned for
its unusually high number of club members. The artist was interested in
three claims: firstly that, historically speaking, a club is a modern
phenomenon, a product of the Enlightenment process that liberated the
individual from traditional ties and constraints; secondly that,
politically speaking, clubs were reinvented after 1945 and became the
smallest democratic institutions in the new Federal Republic of Germany;
and thirdly that, economically speaking, clubs are ideal networks for
foreign investors. Suse Weber examined the emblems of sports’ clubs, and
the uniforms and rituals of gun clubs and fraternities, testing their
significance and legibility in the present. A selection of her analyses
of coats of arms and emblems, done in the form of sketches and collages,
can be seen in the exhibition. Instead of transposing forms and colours
of club heraldry directly, the artist created own iconic images anew –
an attempt on an artistic level to produce a vocabulary that must do
without a generally valid consensus and that yet still transports
information.
/Formel:Verein/ is made up of four symbolic components of various
colours, which Suse Weber calls the City, the Individual, Hierarchy, and
the Occasion. The City presents itself as a static, monumental
construction; the Individual as a human representative constrained like
a soldier; Hierarchy as an upward-striving column whose number of spikes
could correspond with the stripes and stars on uniforms; and the
Occasion as a ball, an object with a high degree of freedom of movement,
possibly alluding to sports’ clubs as well as to the ritual of shooting
the eagle in a gun club. The combination of differing codes also extends
to the colour semantics, which work with various flag colours, and also
with the greatest possible generalization of the industrial colours
cyan, magenta, and yellow, or with the symbolism of bronze, silver, and
gold. The irony of using plastic to produce precious-metal sculptures is
underscored by the sculptures’ obviously homemade quality. The PVC
hollow-chamber plates are elaborately decorated by silk screening and
individually attached to each other with wire ties; the overall effect
of their unserious materiality is to preclude any all-too-didactic
treatment of the theme. And the stereotypicality evoked by the
material’s unlimited mobility is more reminiscent of a monumental
erector set than of a real monument. But the explosiveness of her work
displays itself precisely at this point. The distance that Suse Weber
creates with her standoffish images enables reflection – in model
fashion, so to speak – on traditions and power. As a contemporary
possibility for iconography, Weber’s emblematic sculptures may not be
able to explain, but they can at least question the mechanisms of
socialization and cooptation – and thereby and lastingly disturb the
viewer again and again (see Magdalena Holzhey, catalogue
/Formel:Verein/, Mönchengladbach).
In another group of works on show, a series of torsi, made following an
identical pattern like a knight’s coat of armour, Suse Weber uses and
transforms a wide variety of materials, including biographical
photographs of earlier works, graphic designs, and sections of
silkscreen prints of her present work.
Opening: Friday, January 16, 2009, 6-9 pm
Galerie Barbara Weiss
Zimmerstrasse 88-91 - Berlin
Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am-6 pm
Free admission