9/9/2010
Regine Muller Waldeck
Klemm's, Berlin
The collection of new works in Tomatencasino debates the conservation of wishes and dreams never fulfilled or implemented - long since not questioned - which are cultivated by habit. How does one remember the futile attempt to get the full value out of life, and the risks taken while trying?
Regine Müller-Waldeck’s sculptures, ensembles and installations are positioned somewhere between concrete narrative and abstract ambiguity. They seek to pin down experiences and emotions that can hardly be named.
Preceding the works is an intense examination of emotional states – such as insecurity, grief, vulnerability, but also ease, of letting go, or of sudden confidence – which initially remains on a purely theoretical level. While searching for a “distillate” or the “essential”, a particular form crystalizes. Reduced to a few elements and by means of an eclectic and simple construction, the works combine their material presence with a strong associative power.
The use of specific materials plays a particular role in Regine Müller-Waldeck’s work: she chooses plaster, paraffin wax, wood, cloth and lastly metal because of their imaginative potential. Materiality, surface texture and visual presence offer a first possibility to access these works. Typically, materials are used in ways contrary to their usual attributes – plaster and paraffin wax claim the role of “end product”, cloth appears to be well-fortified armor and metal is relieved of its weight. Through specific application of the “painterly power” of her materials, Regine Müller-Waldeck achieves a reconnection to her concerns with regard to the content itself.
Like three-dimensional images the works get caught directly in perception. They oscillate between material and emotional terms and divest themselves through all their suggestiveness of any direct definition.
The collection of new works in ‘Tomatencasino’ debate the conservation of wishes and dreams never fulfilled or implemented — long since not questioned — which are cultivated by habit. How does one remember the futile attempt to get the full value out of life, and the risks taken while trying? Do they help to fill the inner void and protect desire or longing from reality?
The five works consciously appear somewhere between over-sized model arrangement, architectural quotation and material collage. They form a course according to the title of the exhibition that needs to be walked. The entanglement of different material and colors, the display of real and fake patina or rather glow and dullness express the relationship of playfulness and earnestness.
The theme of the exhibition room itself is an abstracted “Casino”: the central work ‘Door’ functions as a border between main room and the literal ‘back room’. Two square metal constructions which are twisted into each other take up the entire visual space, but remain permeable in a few spots. Elements of cloth stiffened to an unclear materiality continue to draw attention to this permeability rather than to the space behind.
The play between overall impression and detail is a fundamental element of this exhibition. The shiny surfaces in ‘Wound’ in the main room, for instance, are obviously brutally pierced: the play of colors generated by this action on the material is only seen at closer inspection. The resulting hole now enables the object be hung on the wall, to be presented and even preserved. The physical injury thus appears to be necessary in order to offer a hanger to memory and to endow it with any kind of meaning whatsoever.
A reference to the non-redeemedness and meagerness hinted at in the title of the exhibition is displayed by the work ‘Morning Star’. The richly decorated post of a Wilhelminian-style banister – produced as its own replica from different materials – hovers at head-height in the air. In form similar to a chandelier, the work however turns out to be merely a bundle of detached staircase posts, absolved of their actual function, hanging only provisionally from the ceiling, and revealing themselves as menacing gestures. The work seems to hold an equilibrium between activity and passivity.
The works appear to be equally autonomous from and relating to one another. This motif of doubling and repetition emerges regularly in Regine Müller-Waldeck’s work. It alludes to the idea that the current form is only a consequence of an experience, one that under similar circumstances would again provoke a similar result.
Opening: September 10th from 6 - 9 p.m.
Klemm's
Brunnenstrasse 7 - Berlin
Hours: Tue-Sat 11-18 h
Free admission