Concurrence 2009 – 2016

In this group of papiermaché sculptures, that I call „Concurrence“, I have worked with models who “donated” their bodies to a specific sculpture. In an intimate session I have casted the body in the desired position and afterwards realized the form out of hand made papermaché.

In various transformations of the sculpted body I try to uncover the mystery of the innermost. We can see concaves, that I fill with objects like a bird´s nest. Or the figure shows external signs like stings or skulls. In a few cases I work only with a part of a body.

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A Quiet Dynamic of Ambivalence

A woman´s eyes overflow and offer a helping hand of an unusual kind: tiny arms reach out of her eye sockets and stretch beyond the female face, almost as if they wanted to touch the viewer, while the woman´s thin lips smile faintly. Nadine Rennert calls this work „Refuge in Ambiguity“ (2013); a second bust adds to its double meaning. Like the first, the second bust is made of handmade Korean paper. But, unlike the first, it has carefully molded eyes. And its mouth is wide open – and stuffed full of limbs: two legs are sticking out of it. It looks like someone is being devoured. In fact, the Janus-like arrangement of the two busts suggests that a mini person has been gobbled up one, only to be released back into life by the other. Good fairy, bad fairy. But the simile doesn’t quite work, for the two hollow forms of the female likenesses, which are facing opposite directions, are calibrated to a certain distance. Between them is empty, open space.

MICHAEL HÜBL, KUENSTLER – Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, 2014

This comparision with the disillusioned realism of that era, which rippled out even into the Baroque periods, is further supported by the Artists use of the death´s-head motif in various works – perhaps most memorably in her sculpture (or sculptural setting) „Erinnerung an Vollendung“ (Reminiscence to Completion, 2011), in which a voluptuous female figure is perched on a tall Stoll, holding a thick rope in her hands. It lies coiled before her on the floor at a certain distance and extends from there to between her legs, becoming visible again behind her, under her posterior. It’s unclear whether the sitting figure is introducing the thick rope into her body or if she is pulling it like a bulky umbilical cord out of it. What is certain is that existence and nonexistence are at play here. The rope is cut off like a Norns´threads of fate in Norse mythology. And: from the back of her head and over her soft fill breasts down to her ankles, the woman’s figure is covered with the bleak grimaces of skulls.

MICHAEL HÜBL, KUENSTLER – Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, 2014

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