(En) We are pleased to present sculptures by three artists who teach at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts - John Bock, Harald Klingelhöller and Meuser - in the current show at our Karlsruhe gallery space. The actions, performances, films, installations, objects and collages by John Bock highlight the prosthetic character of the issues that he subjects to re-presentation and dismemberment at the same time. Through language and dramatic composition, in the form of “lectures,” the artist …
(En) We are pleased to present sculptures by three artists who teach at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts - John Bock, Harald Klingelhöller and Meuser - in the current show at our Karlsruhe gallery space.
The actions, performances, films, installations, objects and collages by John Bock highlight the prosthetic character of the issues that he subjects to re-presentation and dismemberment at the same time. Through language and dramatic composition, in the form of “lectures,” the artist himself becomes the connecting link between the media which he uses in his artistic work. Bock´s sculptures occasionally play the role of props in his cinematic and performative mise-en-scènes, afterwards they become relics of these within the context of his discursive installations. But as autonomous figures, they can also inscribe the exhibition space as the location of an event. Then they become scenic organisms that include their viewer as a coincidental participant of an arrangement of objects based on reaction.
The sculptures of Harald Klingelhöller are free-hanging or arranged in groups on the floor, they resemble props from a story told in an associative manner. In his transformations and continuations of linguistic structures the artist generates plastic forms, which he converts visually as well as haptically - through the development of graphically implemented structures into sculptures in space. The title of the individual piece thus not only indicates the object, but also denotes the series of letters which form the corpus of the object, whether in fragments or repetition. Sentences and words which can make up the substance of different groups of works produce an analogue narrative description of space - through the layering of language, writing and sculptural corpus.
Sculptures by Meuser draw their form from reality, which their concrete, brittle shapes reduce to a metallic framework, offering a new direction of thought to the real context from which they originate. Meuser uses steel for his work, often scrap metal, which the artist finds and endows with an independent existence within a new frame of reference. Reshaping, colour and language are crucial to this process. The often vivid colouring of his objects borders on painting, however - detached from the canvas - they inscribe their surroundings as autonomous objects. Meuser´s objects forcefully break open of the format of painting without being paintings. Instead they are contour, their own material and its form, in their pure shape they designate the constructive, which Meuser leaves to its own devices while lending the object its own narration and rhetoric.
Christina Irrgang
translation by Zoe Claire Miller