Gedi Sibony
Falke Pisano
Lasse Schmidt Hansen
Rosalind Nashashibi
Lucy Skaer
Philipp Ziegler
Without necessarily belonging to the category of sculpture, all works on view, installation, film, photography or performance, enter first and foremost into a critical reflection about the conventional ways of perceiving sculpture as a three-dimensional medium.
Group show
Curated by: Philipp Ziegler
Traditionally we think of sculpture as three-dimensional objects, which
distinguish themselves formally through their physical presence and the
aesthetic qualities of the material they are made of. Abstraction,
solidity and durability are other qualities usually associated with
this medium.
Galerie Reinhard Hauff’s present group show, “About the
possibility of a Sculpture”, curated by Philipp Ziegler, attempts
through works by Gedi Sibony, Falke Pisano, Lasse Schmidt Hansen and
Rosalind Nashashibi/Lucy Skaer to take a critical look at these
conventional ways of perceiving an artistic medium, which for a while
now enjoys increasing interest.
Questions relating to the nature of
sculpture are in the context of this show not confined to the
object-bound, but contemplate the nature of sculpture as
aesthetic-perceptive sensory input. Without necessarily belonging to
the category of sculpture, all the works which are shown in this
exhibition - be it installation, film, photography or performance -
enter first and foremost into a reflective relationship to the medium
of sculpture.
In an exemplary manner, the Dutch artist Falke Pisano,
expresses this line of thought, reflecting on the different
possibilities and ways of perceiving sculpture in one of her own pieces
“A sculpture turning into a conversation”: “Things can sometimes turn
into other things(...) Friendship can turn into love and the other way
round, situations transform into completely different situations
regularly, a book can be turned into a film, solid materials into
liquid materials in many cases and sometimes into gas”.
From found materials such as cardboard, plywood, wall-to-wall carpeting
and wooden sticks, the New York artist Gedi Sibony (*1973) creates
reductionistic constructions, handling materials in a minimalist manner
which retain traces of their original usage and nature. In his
acclaimed installation at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York, where he
used the discarded materials from the Whitney’s previous Robert
Smithson retrospective, the sensitive aesthetic of the materials he
used, combined with their historical reference to past purposes and
identities, lent his installation - as well as the objects now shown at
the Galerie Reinhard Hauff - a subtle poetic language which addresses
as much our senses as our memory.
Falke Pisano (*1978), who was
studying at Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht until the end of 2006,
and parrallel to this show is participating in a group show at the
Stuttgarter Künstlerhaus, is represented with a selection of works in
which she reflects on the effect-mechanisms of modernist sculpture and
their abstract form language through theoretical texts, models and
lecture performances. The Danish-born Frankfurt artist Lasse Schmidt
Hansen (*1978), who participated in a 2005 group show at the Galerie
Reinhard Hauff, works with everyday design objects to re-think and
reformulate standardised systems.
In these subversive-conceptual works
the artist makes frequent references to minimalist sculptures of the
60’s. The 16-mm film “Flash in the Metropolitan”, shown in the entrance
area of the Gallery, is the result of a collaboration between the two
artists Rosalind Nashashibi (*1973) and Lucy Skaer (*1975) who will
represent Scotland in this year’s Venice Biennial. The film - shot at
night in the sculpture galleries of the New York Metropolitan Museum -
liberates enigmatic objects from their nocturnal vitrine environment,
to briefly restore them to their original splendour and beauty in the
glare of flash lights and spots.
Galerie Reinhard Hauff
Paulinenstr. 47 - Stuttgart