Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Keramik

Keramik 

Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel, Masaomi Yasunaga

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

17 March — 22 April 2023

© Buchmann Galerie

With Keramik, the Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by seven artists who have each made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary ceramic art: Seyni Awa Camara, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Martin Disler, Bettina Pousttchi, Rosemarie Trockel and Masaomi Yasunaga. 

Dating back to the Palaeolithic period around 24,000 BCE, ceramic art is one of the earliest forms of cultural expression. Ceramic materials have always been used for decorative and utilitarian purposes as well as for pure artistic expression, lending the medium an ambivalence that visual artists have so often found in their relationship to it. Too closely associated with craft and design for some, others have found ways to use ceramics and transform them into modes of free artistic expression. Both artists’ embrace of the ceramic arts and their rejection of it have happened in the context of the many artistic phases since 20th-century modernism. Today, ceramics are once again in focus despite the conclusiveness of the global digitization of our lived environment. Although they have found their way into aviation and medical technologies, the originality of ceramic materials and the archaic nature of their processing, which has not changed significantly since its inception, appears like a counter-image to an artificial world of pixels and algorithms.

Exhibitions such as The Flames at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris in 2021 or Toucher Terre at the Fondation Villa Datris in 2022 have each engaged this wide range of ceramic referents. The exhibition Keramik at the Buchmann Galerie focuses on the work of artists whose ceramic experiments go beyond the materials’ utilitarian connotations, instead exploring the technical limits imposed by each substance and its application. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see ceramic sculptures from large-scale installations to smaller, more intimate works. 

Initiated as a child into traditional ceramic techniques by her mother, the practice of Seyni Awa Camara (b. 1945 in Bignona, Senegal) quickly moved away from the utilitarian to the artistic. Camara has evolved her own distinct and expressive form of sculpture in which she creates works that range in size from just over 40 centimetres to a more totemic scale of up to 180 centimetres tall. Modelled by hand, the sculptures are fired on a wooden pyre in the yard in front of the artist’s house, sometimes adding ore or treating the clay with putrefied tree pods to create a burnished finish on the surface of the terracotta. Camara’s figurative work is based on legends, observation, objects and landscapes as well as on her own personal experiences. 

The glazed sculpture In Camera by Tony Cragg (b. 1949 in Liverpool, UK) and the sandblasted white porcelain sculpture Silent Conversation – featuring two figurines of Chinese noblemen – explore the possibilities of form and texture with dissonant results. Protected by a thick metallic glaze, In Camera reminds one of some unknown piece of machinery whose function remains open. This invented form contrasts with the two found decorative porcelain figures of Silent Conversation and the perforated white surfaces that highlight the fragility of their material. A peculiar silence is inherent in this latter sculpture, which seems like a contrast to the strong rhythmical form of In Camera.  

The work Flat 59 by Richard Deacon (b. 1949 in Bangor, Wales, UK) is a large, flat rectangular plate of fired ceramic material, which leans against a stand like an unhung full-size mirror or large picture frame. The plate’s size and technical perfection is exceptional. Deacon combines the minimalist form with an expressive and painterly glaze of many colours, surrounded by a thin red glaze around the edges. This contrast accentuates the object’s invocation of boundaries and lines of demarcation. 

Martin Disler (1949, Seewen, Switzerland–1996, Geneva, Switzerland) has always evinced a fascination with ancient legends and myths. In Martin Disler’s works, the expression of life, love and death plays a central role, as is the case in this large terracotta vase. Drawings of skulls and faces were scratched into the wet clay and remain as traces of the artist’s hand, even after being fired. 

The sculptures of Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1971 in Mainz, Germany) often reference architecture and its social implications. Stemming from the artist’s interest in transforming functional objects, these works take inspiration from architectural cornice stones whilst utilizing a dense coloured glaze. In the use of prefabricated modules lies a conceptual connection to Minimal Art and a reference also to Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades.

Like much of her oeuvre, Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) intricate and visually captivating ceramic works engage with themes of gender and identity. She plays with traditional forms and techniques – one sculpture is completely covered by black and white glazes while the other work remains unglazed – creating abstract shapes that challenge the viewer’s imagination. The evocative work entitled Kinderkrippe inspires an array of associations, displaying openly visible traces of the artist’s fingers that show the force and energy with which the material was modelled.

The inventive works by Masaomi Yasunaga (b. 1982 in Osaka Prefecture, Japan) challenge the presumed functionality of the materials used in ceramic art, thus advancing its sculptural directive. His most recent works cannot technically be categorized as ceramic, as there is no clay present in his finished forms. Unlike pottery, usually made of clay and finished with a glazed surface, Yasunaga sculpts glaze as the primary material of his objects that are pit-fired, buried in sand and combined with unique raw materials such as feldspar, glass and metal powders. The viscous glaze melts, collapses and aggregates with these materials, hardening to a stone-like consistency in the kiln. The resulting objects, mostly non-functional vessels, shells and empty containers, have the appearance of lost and found archaeological relics. 

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com

Felice Varini @ Buchmann Gallery, Lugano

Felice Varini 

Buchmann Galerie, Lugano 

Through 31 December 2021

Buchmann Lugano presents new works by FELICE VARINI (Locarno *1952), internationally renowned artist from Ticino.

On display are large lacquered steel sculpture made for the occasion and a pictorial intervention in situ. The latter is displayed as it was conceived only from a certain point of view. The visitor is able to have unlimited decomposed and unforeseen versions of it simply by moving his gaze.

Felice Varini "invades" the space directly involving the spectator, called to trigger in first person the mechanisms of perspective and spatial deformation prepared by the artist.

Felice Varini's public works distinguish entire landscapes and architectures among them are: La Seine Musicale, Ile Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris (2020), Galeries la Fayette Mall, Shanghai (2019), Shanghai Yang Pu Waterfront (2019), Château et Remparts de la Cité de Carcassonne (2018), Yerevan Central Railway Station, Yerevan, Armenia (2017), Kunsthalle in Osnabrück (2017), MAMO, Cité Radieuse, Marseille (2016). In the space of MASI - Palazzo Reali there is one of his mural paintings. Three works made for the LAC parking garage in 2012 became the first acquisitions for the opening of the new cultural center of Lugano. A large pictorial intervention of his has been realized, moreover, in the headquarters of the Banca Stato del Canton Ticino in Bellinzona. The artist has already been collaborating with the Buchmann gallery for many years. In 2013 with the work Zig Zag of triangles for the pillar has inaugurated the space Buchmann Lugano.

BUCHMANN LUGANO

Via della Posta 2, CH-6900 Lugano

www.buchmanngalerie.com

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Fiona Rae @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Row Paintings

Fiona Rae: Row Paintings

Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

5 November — 18 December 2021

Fiona Rae

Untitled (six on grey 1), 1990

Oil on canvas, 213,4 x 198,1 cm / 84 x 78 in

© Fiona Rae, Courtesy Buchmann Galerie

Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition from the series ‘Row Paintings’ by British artist FIONA RAE.

The ‘Row Paintings’ were created in the late 1980s, a time when painting was seen by many as outmoded and irrelevant. Challenged by this climate to find a way to recontextualise and thereby reinvigorate the possibilities of painting, Fiona Rae began her pioneering engagement with the medium and formed her own visual language.

The ‘Row Paintings’ provide a first glimpse of the conceptual framework that the artist has maintained and developed further since that time in more than fifteen sometimes extensive and diverse groups of works. Fiona Rae’s improvisations – painted directly on the canvas within self-determined parameters – employ a visual language that shows recurring painterly as well as semiotic conventions.

Looking at the canvases of the ‘Row Paintings’, one might note the calligraphic and painterly gestures arranged in rows, exuberant forms reminiscent of pictograms or an alphabet of painting. The artist speaks of “characters”, almost figurative elements that follow a precise yet free choreography on the stage of the canvas. It is with these means that Fiona Rae explores painting from the axis of both high and popular culture, making use of diverse references such as Abstract Expressionism, Philip Guston’s late work and the surreal comic strips of George Herriman.

Compositionally, the ‘Row Paintings’ are strictly structured, the pictorial material organised in rows, similar to a notation. This order also gives the series its title. However, the supposed rigidity, the conceptual framework, is repeatedly torn apart and negated by the gestural inserts. Splashes of colour and gradients disturb the strict design and demand their own space. The tension and suspense that the paintings create is strongly determined by this fruitful conflict: to conjure up a painterly vocabulary and grammar in order to subvert and light-handedly transform them using the same means.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the American art theorist and critic Terry R. Myers writes of Fiona Rae’s paintings existing in the “perpetual present […] without strain or surrender.” The presence of the works does indeed seem effortless, and – when one considers the myriad references hidden in this seemingly abstract painting – visually rich.

The contemporary relevance of the ‘Row Paintings’ is also evident in the current exhibition Explorations in Paint at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There, the work Untitled (six on brown), 1989, is set in dialogue with other historical works from the collection.

Works from the ‘Row Paintings’ series were first shown in the 1988 exhibition Freeze in London’s Docklands. It put Fiona Rae on the map as an early member of the group which became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who would revolutionise the British art world and beyond. Works by the artist are represented in numerous public collections, including the Tate Collection UK, Centre Pompidou Paris, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (Mudam) Luxembourg. Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong in 1963 and lives and works in London.

The catalogue of the exhibition Fiona Rae: Row Paintings, with an essay by Terry R. Myers, is published by DCV Books (German/English, 56 pp.). It can be ordered via Buchmann Galerie or from the publisher. 

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin

www.buchmanngalerie.com

Martin Disler @ Buchmann Lugano

Martin Disler
Buchmann Lugano
Through 29 June 2019

The exhibition space Buchmann Lugano presents a solo show by the Swiss artist MARTIN DISLER (1949-1996). The gallery, since 2012 curates the Estate of Disler and presents on this occasion a selection of works on paper and pottery.

Born in 1949 in Seewen, Martin Disler began to exhibit in Switzerland and abroad since the 1970s. His first solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1980 entitled Invasion durch eine falsche Sprache, marks a turning point in the artist's career. The same year he took part at the Venice Art Biennale, in 1982 at Documenta 7 in Kassel and in 1984 in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York gaining popularity internationally.

Martin Disler, self-taught artist, driven by an incessant and frenetic creativity, has investigated themes such as death and life, frequently represented in an almost obsessive way. A gestural painting, sometimes impulsive, others more controlled and soft, characterizes his entire work.

He lived in New York, Amsterdam, Milan, Zurich, Lugano and Les Planchettes. Disappeared at only 47 years old, he leaves behind a rich artistic production including: sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, poems and writings, preserved today in his archive in Basel.

Recently Die Umgebung der Liebe created in 1981 for the Stuttgarter Kunstverein, and acquired in 2006 by the Gottfried Keller Stiftung,  was exhibited for the first time in its entirety at the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur (until 26 May 2019).

Tony Cragg's Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden has also recently opened a Disler’s exhibition of bronze sculptures by the Häutung und Tanz group, made in 1991/92 in the Besso atelier at that time and merged into the sub-foundries, (until 16 June 2019).

BUCHMANN LUGANO
Via della Posta 2, CH-6900 Lugano
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Nigel Cooke @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Spring in Fialta

Nigel Cooke: Spring in Fialta
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin
Through 29 June 2019

Buchmann Galerie presents NIGEL COOKE ’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Nigel Cooke (born 1973 in Manchester, UK, lives and works in Kent, UK) is one of the most prominent painters of his generation. His large-format tableaus captivate with breath-taking combinations of figurative and abstract elements. Nigel Cooke creates contemporary visionary landscapes - epic yet highly personal paintings created from a combination of memory, imagination and intuition. Set in complex spaces lit with strange and sometimes toxic nuances of color, these images are often populated by fragmented or distorted figures - composite beings who move through the space whilst also seeming to merge with it.

Nigel Cooke’s approach to painting - as a process, as an object and as an image - questions, rewrites and undermines itself in the process of becoming a finished work. This process serves as much to corrupt the image as to depict it, creating instability on both physical and psychological levels. The works have echoes of many of the gestures and images persistent in art history, but re-organise them with a new kind of tension, becoming a complex equation of gestures, techniques and possibilities that explore the full vocabulary of painting. The almost symphonic range of marks and lines in the works attempts to capture the complexity of lived experience in a psychologically layered whole. In the artist’s words, a painting raises a question – “what’s the difference between painting and thinking, or painting and looking, or painting and living? In a way, a painting sits on a junction of all those things … It’s almost as if the point where those things meet suggests an image.” [1] 

In the new group of works presented, Nigel Cooke further reduces his compositions, reaching a point of almost complete abstraction. The works reflect his impressions of landscapes he has visited, recreating, for example in Beach Fires, the faded recollections of people gathering by the beach at night around several lit fires. The smaller-scale canvases Borca, Isella and Fornarelli are highly personal, abstracted and painterly transformations of Nigel Cooke’s visual memories and emotions from travel in Northern Italy.

The large canvases are characterized by a central positioning of figures, arranged in impressive natural compositions that define the dynamic of the image. Nigel Cooke paints these semi-abstract figures with fine, thread-like lines, giving them a sense of weightlessness and supernatural transparency. However, as they merge into each other, the sum of their appearances and movements ultimately gives the composition a visually monumental quality. The works recall the many instances of the Bathers theme in art history, in particular its link with the emergence of abstraction through the work of Cezanne, Picasso and others. In both surface and setting, Spring Bathers most vividly connects here, but is presented more as a personal memory than a strict visual reference, unstable, fading in and out. The theme strikes a note of familiarity, prioritising examination of how the work is made over references or narrative. 

The works on paper bear witness to Nigel Cooke’s very process of painting and the formal research that feeds it, where the artist explores variants of light and color in the form of abstract vignettes, each bursting with colour contrasts and dynamic, almost confessional gestures.

Nigel Cooke’s attempt to create an evocative and multi-layered language, rich in associations and yet highly subjective, creates works that feed on the artist’s and the viewer’s memories - at once exquisite and disturbing, familiar and sublime.

Nigel Cooke’s work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Tate, London; British Council, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

[1] Nigel Cooke, Darian Leader in conversation with Nigel Cooke, p. 8, Phaidon Press Ltd.; London 2016

BUCHMANN GALERIE
Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Tony Cragg @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

Tony Cragg
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin
Through 16 February, 2019

Tony Cragg

Untitled (Multiple Skull), 2017

Wood

240 (h) x 227 x 172 cm - 95 x 89 x 68 in

(c) Tony Cragg, Courtesy Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition featuring new sculptures and drawings by Tony Cragg.

In the front exhibition space, a monumental sculpture from the new work group Skulls, measuring 240 x 227 x 172 cm, makes a powerful impression with its complex interlock of internal and external spaces. The entire volume of this work constructed from layered plywood is permeated by innumerable close-lying and in some cases interlaced, tube-like forms. They open up a surprising insight into the sculpture's internal depths. Resembling foam and yet conveying solidity, the work evokes organic forms, the innermost part of which generates the exterior. Tony Cragg explains: "There exists a real psychological pressure and need for the viewer to see beyond the surface and that all the forms we see provide a connection to the greater and more fundamental external and internal forces that make them."

The group of work Hedges, inspired by Tony Cragg's childhood memories of landscapes with hedges in his English home region, comprises filigree leaf- and blade-like forms. The organic configurations rouse associations with a hedge or tumbleweed. The red-brown, matt shimmering patina of the steel contributes to these natural associations. However, looking more closely, it becomes clear that the forms, in their buoyancy and arrangement, are artificial – they are man-made. Like a mobile, the formations seem to float in a perfectly balanced state, as if their shape could alter at any given moment.

Conversion, made from aluminium, adopts the leaf-like structure of the Hedges but transposes it into a floral setting, which in turn seems to explode the limitations of abstraction with its camouflage finish.

Tony Cragg is an artist who has always utilized a study of natural science in order to challenge nature. The absolute loyalty to his materials that Peter Schjeldahl attests to the artist (1) meets with a will to form in Tony Cragg's work that is not exhausted in the work itself but wrestles with nature. "I am an extreme materialist" the artist maintains repeatedly. And Peter Schjeldahl adds that it is from this alone that the fantastic spectrum of material and formal freedom can emerge, which characterizes this great sculptor's extensive oeuvre.

In the Buchmann Box are showing a collection of recent sculptures and drawings, which exemplify the artist's work as it continues to unfold in an almost encyclopaedic manner. The sculptor's outstanding significance was recognized impressively in 2007, when he received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture.

In the last two years several important solo presentations of Tony Cragg's work have taken place, including in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Mudam Luxembourg, and the comprehensive retrospective "Parts of the World" in the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, in 2016. A Rare Category of Objects in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, was one of the most extensive outdoor exhibitions of his art seen to date. A five volume monographic publication examining Tony Cragg's work is currently being issued by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne. Besides a volume about his drawings and prints, it comprises three volumes on his sculptures since the late 1960s, as well as a volume of the artist's own writing. Three of these volumes are already available.

(1) Peter Schjeldahl, Cragg's Big Bang, in: Anthony Cragg, Parts of the World, Cologne 2016, pp. 155-166

BUCHMANN GALERIE
Charlottenstraße 13, D-10969 Berlin
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Tatsuo Miyajima, Drawings @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

Tatsuo Miyajima: Drawings
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin
28 September - 3 November 2018

Buchmann Galerie presents the first solo exhibition of drawings by TATSUO MIYAJIMA (*1957, Tokyo) 

Tatsuo Miyajima is one of Japan‘s most important sculptors and installation artists. In his œuvre, the artist – who became known primarily for his works using digital light diodes (LED) – is concerned with concepts of time, its (non-) calculability and its cultural and existential dimension. 

One important component of the works is counting and sequences of numbers. These numbers, appearing in continuous and recurrent - although not necessarily consecutive - cycles from 1 to 9, represent the journey of life until death, whose finality is symbolized by ‚0‘ or the zero point. Consequently, this never appears in the artist‘s work. The series of works on paper from 1995 to 2018 now collected in the Buchmann Box explore several issues essential to Tatsuo Miyajima‘s work. 

Kũ Drawing Series 

In the Zen tradition Kũ stands for emptiness (Kũ is the transcription of the Sanskrit word sunya or sunyata, translated literally as „emptiness“). Tatsuo Miyajima describes how he produced these drawings in a state of Kũ, holding a pencil in his hand, his eyes closed: The lines from my subconscious show my time spent in emptiness. The length of time given in the title, 15 minutes for example, describes the period of time which I spent in an altered state of mind, with my eyes closed. 

Innumerable Counts Series 

Every number in these drawings represents a moment in the counting cycle from 9 to 1. The empty space in the potentially in infinite sequence of numbers re- presents the figure zero, which - as indicated above - does not appear in his work. In these drawings the artist is attempting to grasp moments in cycles of innumerable counts. The Innumerable Counts visualize life for Tatsuo Miyajima. The spirals or lines in the drawings are thus excerpts from a broader context, from innumerable moments in time. 

Count Down Drawing Series 

Tatsuo Miyajima provides a different interpretation of the zero, the empty space, in his Count Down Drawing Series: this series of works shows a repea- ted sequence, counting down from 9 to 1, as the title suggests. Here, too, the place of zero (Kũ) is represented by an empty space or fille with a thin gold foil or a microchip. In this variation the empty space is filled; it is, as the artist points out, the field provided with every possibility, the field of potential. 

The artist‘s works on paper are an essential component of his practice, seen as equal in status to the installation pieces and performances. They complete the artist‘s complex œuvre, which is characterized by investigation into the significance of counting and time, and by subtle meditations exhibiting sublime precision and finesse. 

Important works by the artist can be found in collections including the Tate Gallery London, the Bavarian State Collection of Painting Munich, La Caixa Barcelona, the Deste Foundation in Athens, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Leeum Seoul, Kunstmuseum Bern, and M+ in Hong Kong. 

Buchmann Box 
Charlottenstrasse 75, 10117 Berlin
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Véronique Arnold @ Buchmann Galerie, Lugano - Ou elles volent, ou elles tombent

Véronique Arnold  

Ou elles volent, ou elles tombent 
Buchmann Galerie, Lugano 
8 September 2018 - 26 January 2019 

The exhibition space Buchmann Lugano presents the artist Véronique Arnold (Strasbourg, *1973).

The exhibition presents new, unseen art works, realised specifically for this occasion. The central space of the Gallery in Lugano hosts a work which sits on the border between installation and sculpture. The artist started with gathering real leaves during her walks. She then dipped them in white porcelain and at a later stage, she carefully and meticulously applied extra layers of porcelain by hand. Until finally being baked in a specialized oven. The result of this slow, painted and delicate process was then laid, with particular calm and attention on a plinth expressly conceived for the city space. The leaf, symbol of fragility and lightness, recalls the transience of life, leads to a reflection of death and their profound meaning.

To complete the exhibition, on the walls: graphite drawings on canvas, which once again present leaves that seem to be moving, perhaps echoing the title of the exhibition.

In short, the work of Véronique Arnold gives intense emotions to its poetic strength, inserting natural elements into a broader and more complex metaphorical discourse, while maintaining a vocabulary that is coherent to the viewer. Fascinating works, whose genesis implies a repetitive gesture, almost a form of ritual, of which the artist takes charge and gives back to the community in a refined visual and emotional experience.

Véronique Arnold realised a personal exhibition at the gallery Stampa of Basel (2017), at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Mulhouse (2015), exhibited in a collective at the Fondation Fernet-Branca of Saint-Louis in Alsace (2015), she collaborated with Christine Ferber and Jean-Paul Hévin at the Salon du Chocolat of Isetan in Tokyo (2012) and presented her works at the Palazzo Salis, Soglio della Biblioteca Engiadinaisa, Sils Maria (2012).

In addition to this exhibition, you may find her works on paper a t the WOPART fair 2018 starting from the 20th to the 23rd of September presented in our stand B2 at the Centro Esposizioni of Lugano.

BUCHMANN LUGANO
Via della Posta 2, CH-6900 Lugano
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Wolfgang Laib, Buchmann Galerie, Cologne - Where the Land and Water Ends

Wolfgang Laib

Where the Land and Water Ends

Buchmann Galerie, Cologne

January 31 - March 24, 2004

The Buchmann Gallery presents Where the Land and Water Ends, Wolfgang Laib’s first large installation work in black and vermillion red thitsi lacquer from Burma (Myanmar).

In 2002, having previously worked with selected materials such as pollen, milk, beeswax, marble, rice and sealing wax, Wolfgang Laib created his first thitsi lacquer sculptures, which were exhibited by Buchmann gallery during Art Basel 2002.

Upon entering the vast lacquer chamber in Cologne, the visitor is immediately captivated by the power of the work. The room allows for an experience the like of which often seems foreign to us in this day and age. In the diffuse light and concentrated stillness there arises a fascinating sense of bewilderment about the ineffable and inexplicable nature of our being.

In 1975 Wolfgang Laib (born 1950) created the first milk stones, in 1977 he collected his first pollen, in 1983 he worked with rice for the first time, in 1987 with beeswax and in 2002 with thitsi lacquer. Wolfgang Laib never quite completes any of his group of works. They stand side-by-side, equal in weight and in worth. In this way the artist is not concerned with innovation or formal further development but with continuity. His work is marked by shapes and materials which repeat themselves in regular cycles.

For many years Wolfgang Laib has belonged to that group of German artists who are consistently valued and held in high esteem both at home and abroad. At the start of 2003, a retrospective toured five museums in the USA and culminated in an exhibition, notable both for its size and success, in Munich’s Haus der Kunst. A comprehensive retrospective is currently touring Asia’s most important museums. Major works by Wolfgang Laib are featured in, among others, the collections of MoMA New York, the De Pont Foundation in Tilburg, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart and the Kunstmuseum in Bonn.

BUCHMANN GALERIE

Aachener Strasse 65, 50674 Cologne

www.buchmanngalerie.com

Related Post: Wolfgang Laib: Nowhere-Everywhere, Sperone Westwater, New York (1998)