“You have created something eternal.” A few days after the 7th Artists' Fair of the Association of Visual Artists in Stuttgart I found this comment in my mailbox. The visitor was referring to my new work “Take a journey out of yourself and into yourself” and went on: “I believe you have discovered something very, very important for yourself and opened it up for us, something that is much, much more than common motifs can achieve.”
The work shows a human figure, as they stand again and again at the centre of my work. Flooded with light, full of energy, in motion. For a long time I had wrapped the figures in spherical forms to express vitality, mobility and transience at the same time. During my time in India at the beginning of the year (more about this in my blog post) I created for the first time a space around the figure at the centre with a cube, which with its straight lines and symmetrical structure is more reminiscent of the world of crystals. The relationship between figure and space thus comes into focus.
“The message that we humans are embedded, and that the cosmos really is a cosmos – that is what I feel in your sculptures,” I read on. “And that moves me.” This feeling culminates in a resonance that does not leave the viewer alone, but expresses his or her own embeddedness.
Such feedback from people who engage with my works gives me impulses to look and feel even more closely myself. It lets me look back on a development that was not planned and yet can be reconstructed.
Years ago I discovered and developed steel frame constructions as a transparent counterpoint to the human figure. A two-dimensional square was the beginning, here in the “cosmogenic window” created in 2008.
The context I set, in which a human figure appears, is often only noticed by viewers at second glance. But whether it is a wooden base, a steel plate or a steel construction, these constructions shape the work just as much as the figure in the foreground, which stands out from them and takes a position. The dynamism of the wire meshes is heightened by the calm counterpoint of the artistically set surroundings. At first it was stones and rocks from which the figures took off to leap or fly. Later the relationship became closer: steel plates do not just stand in the background like a kind of wall, they are at the same time obstacles to be penetrated. Full of energy, the figure leaps into a new space that opens up before it.
The calm, dark wooden columns, which in their reduced form serve as a base for a developing figure, take on a new function. They support a development and, as change progresses, are symbols of calm and permanence.
With the cube, a calm element once again enters into dialogue with my figures – as
a “frame”, as in the work described by the fair visitor, or as a supporting construction, as in the work “Exploding into Being”. Like a scientific constant, immovable and fixed, it holds the human being in the knowledge of his entanglement, at times inner conflict, in a highly dynamic world.
In this sense, too, the human being is not alone, never completely released and unbound. But the forms of interweaving and our perception are always different – and make development possible.
