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14/3/2013

Christian Megert

Diehl Berlin, Berlin

The light boxes of Christian Megert are unique and represent not only a moment in his own personal artistic development in the 1960s, but they are also a doubled reflection in sense of the intellectual changes that were taking place in terms of understanding the experience of spatial perception at that time.
At the beginning of the modern space age and with a new feeling that the former only theorised continuum of outer space was at last made meaningful, Megert undertook his own aesthetic perceptual terrestrial investigations into light, space and role played by perception. While his art emerged from an early involvement with ‘informel’ painting and material-based monochromes in the mid-to-late 1950s, he began in 1960/61, to experiment with extended spatial realities presented through the use of mirror glass and incorporated them directly into his work. It was with his use of ‘shard’ mirror reliefs that he discovered the potential autonomies presented by the use of reflected light, mirrors and kinetic motion, and these formed the basis for the unique realisation of his light boxes from 1964 onwards.

The light boxes investigate a large number of avenues of perception and our optical understanding of experiencing receding space. These take the form of mirror-to-mirror and florescent strip lighting interactions that serve to incorporate both the immediate perceptions of consciousness and the physical or bodily experience as actions involved in the processes of perceiving. As the viewer moves around in his/her immediate space the perceiving experience constantly changes, and as a result we are made increasingly aware of the incorporated (one might say implied democratic) role that is played by a percipient of a Megert light box work.

Whether using the mirror-to-mirror and simple light strip approach, or incorporating the kinetic motorised aspects of moving mirrors and light strip contents, the light boxes reveal and reflect a radical rethinking of sensory space and human spatial experience that was taking place from the 1950s to 1970s. As a result they re-articulated an increased awareness that our first experiences of the world are in fact those derived from purely sensory phenomena rather than being dictated a priori by mental consciousness.
Using a philosophical simile one might say, instead of ‘I think therefore I am’, it changed to ‘I perceive therefore I am’, suggesting that ‘being in the world’ is a sensory phenomena prior to the self-reflexive intellectual awareness and determination imposed on mental consciousness.
Mark Gisbourne

Press contact:
ARTPRESS – Ute Weingarten Elisabethkirchstraße 15 - 10115 Berlin Tel.: 030-48496350 artpress@uteweingarten.de

Vernissage 15 March 2013 at 7 PM

DIEHL Berlin
Niebuhrstr. 2 10629 Berlin-Charlottenburg
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday 11 am to 6 pm
Saturday 11 am to 2 pm

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