G2 #14
D O U B L E   F E A T U R E
Jochen Plogsties / Claudia Wieser

October 11, 2019 – January 12, 2020
Exhibition opening: Thursday, October 10, 2019, 6–9PM
Press Preview: Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11AM

 

 

It is quite the double feature: set out across G2 Kunsthalle’s galleries, the works of Claudia Wieser and Jochen Plogsties unfold as kindred visual programs that reveal substantial parallels. In two large rooms, Wieser’s wall installations, drawings, sculptures, and objects engage Plogsties’s paintings in dialogue. The artists share a fundamental interest in the appropriation and translation of existing imagery. Meanwhile, each pursues his or her own strategies in grappling with modular systems, abstract basic patterns, and the organization of compositions and forms. In the exhibition space, the convergence of Wieser’s and Plogsties’s practices across considerable differences articulates itself in a kaleidoscopic interplay.

Claudia Wieser’s expansive site-specific installations have insistently charted new lines of inquiry into the integration of architecture, space, abstraction, and visual culture. The artist works in a broad selection of media, from freehand drawing and sculpture to wall installations involving diverse materials such as tapestries, ceramics, mirrors, copper, wood, paper, colored pencils, and gold leaf. This physical polyphony engenders a wide spectrum of geometric forms and multifaceted textures.

Functionality manifests itself in the artist’s objects as a narrative momentum that arises from a playfully experimental examination of usages and architectures. Her designs of wallpapers and carpets derive from black-and-white photographs of works of art, landscapes, or buildings. The tiled columns along the walls reiterate the motif of G2 Kunsthalle’s concrete pillars. But rather than simply replicating the existing architectonic framework, they alter and restructure its architecture. Cylindrical, conical, spherical, and prism-like sculptures act as figurines or staffage. Relying on the principle of the repetition of motifs, colors, and materials, Wieser develops a modular system that forms the core of her formal idiom. She realizes her works with techniques of manual craftsmanship, but also avails herself of digital and industrial production methods. The meticulous execution, the reduction to essential formal elements, the focus on the overall three-dimensional ensemble, and the cross-media approach suggest the inspiration she finds in the holistic idea of art championed by schools of applied arts in the early twentieth century (Bauhaus).

The defining feature of Wieser’s creative practice is the elaboration of disorganized grid systems. Reflections and refractions, chromatic dispersions and fragmentations play a salient role. Segmented mirrors reflect the room, virtually dismantling it and eventually reaggregating all elements in a discontinuous assemblage that yields an inexhaustible perceptual variety. Decomposition thus proves a fundamental process in the genesis of her works, actualizing the consonance inherent in things as an accord of echoes in space.

The principle of repetition also plays a key role in the art of Jochen Plogsties. His pictures translate preexisting images—reproductions of artwork, press or nature photographs—from catalogues, books, magazines, and online sources into painting. Still, his works are not copies in the sense of faithful replication. The motif is often subjected to reduction that renders it almost unrecognizable and leaves it visible only as a basic schema. A web of abstract forms—circles, straight lines, nodes—overlies the composition.

Yet Plogsties is not in fact in the business of defamiliarization or obfuscation through variation. Rather, he appropriates the structures underlying the master illustrations he works with, devising a geometric grid with variable parameters based on pentagons. The question he probes is to which extent our visual culture might grow out of a kind of flexible matrix whose diverse constellations can be traced back in each instance to the same grammatical origin. Plogsties cuts through the world of images in order to expose its makeup.

Today’s incessant digital dissemination of visual material has fueled renewed debates around authorship and intellectual property. Originality, understood to be a quality of unrepeatable and singular creation, is actually a relatively recent idea in the history of art, an idea that says more about how we envision art than about what it can in fact achieve. If, however, we conceive of the notion of uniqueness as primarily a variant interpretation of truthfulness, then Plogsties’s practice may be read as a search for the genuine cohesion of the elements in a pictorial organism. Where the artists of the Renaissance—think of Dürer’s theory of proportions or Leonardo’s revival of the Vitruvian Man—were intent on the ideal ratios that distinguished God’s supreme creation, Plogsties’s painterly derivations map the symmetries between images that are constitutive of the work. Not least importantly, his art manifests the seemingly boundless potential of the principle of repetition as bringing-back and finding-afresh.

text by Anka Ziefer, translation by Gerrit Jackson

Jochen Plogsties (b. Cochem, Germany, 1974) studied painting at the Mainz Academy of Arts from 1997 until 2001 and then painting with Arno Rink at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 2003 until 2006. In 2008, he graduated from Neo Rauch’s master class. He lives and works in Leipzig.

Claudia Wieser (b. Freilassing, Germany, 1973) trained as an ornamental metalsmith at Bergmeister Kunstschmiede, Ebersberg, from 1993 until 1997, then studied painting with Axel Kasseböhmer and Markus Oehlen at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 1997 until 2004. She lives and works in Berlin.

 

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