Arbeiten / Ausstellungen
In-Sicht
Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus, Augsburg, Susanne Pittroff/Eva Schöffel
Ausstellungsdauer: 26. Oktober 2012 – 6. Januar 2013
Öffnungszeiten: Di – So 10-17 Uhr
Die Künstlerinnen Susanne Pittroff und Eva Schöffel haben für die Neue Galerie im Höhmannhauseine ortsbezogene Rauminstallation entworfen.
Susanne Pittroff arbeitet mit Latex, Stahl, Lot und Klebeband.
Im Spannungsfeld der Verwendung anscheinend kaum kombinierbarer Materialien sowie der Einbeziehung der architektonischen Charakteristika des Höhmannhauses ist ein eigenes Kunstwerk auf Zeit entstanden.
Fotos: ©Eva Schöffel, Felix Weinreich
In Sight.
Susanne Pittroff and Eva Schöffel at the Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus
…Likewise for Susanne Pittroff’s artistic procedure, the starting point of all deliberations is the artist’s encounter with the specific situation of a pre-existing venue. Installed immediately adjacent to the previously described artwork, her floor piece is an exemplary demonstration of site-specificity. As though it had been drawn with a compass, a black semicircle extends across the gallery’s floor in low relief and seems to disappear into the wall. Two lines of orange-coloured adhesive tape subdivide this semicircle into three other shapes: approximately one quarter of a circle, a half moon, and an equilateral triangle. Hung above them is a plumb bob, the length and positioning of which relate to the radius, size and measurements of the partial shapes, as well as to their relationships with one another and with the whole. The choice of materials, the dimensioning and the aesthetic impression made by Susanne Pittroff’s artwork are unobtrusive yet striking. The vocabulary of forms here is as minimalistic and as self-confident as is the language spoken by other, long-familiar works created by this same artist: simultaneous symbioses of sketch, relief, sculpture and installation.
These two artists decided to make their exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus into a collaborative project. Although each of the wall pieces and objects demands its autonomy and stands for its creator, it also interacts with the others and with the surrounding space. Through the dialectical overall structure of this project, research into the relationship between inside and outside becomes an associative vehicle that enables the artworks to refer to one another.
This artistic dialogue continues in the exhibition’s other two rooms. Eva Schöffel’s thirteen-piece sequence of photos presents handwritten words and letters of the alphabet which, like fragments from the pages of a personal letter, look as though they are awaiting their completion. The small-format photographs are pinned to the wall unframed and in a free, not linearly legible arrangement which well suits their character as separate sheets of paper strewn seemingly at random. Two equally sensitive floor pieces that Susanne Pittroff has installed in the same room echo this configuration: circles surround coloured latex semicircles, flat on the floor in the one instance and as a sculptural object stretched above a triangular iron frame in the other.
Susanne Pittroff chose these same unconventional combinations of materials for a sculpture in the gallery’s vaulted room, where she augments them with a third ingredient: light. Accurately targeted and narrowly focused illumination shines down from above and causes both the empty triangular plane of an iron scaffold and a latex-covered partial plane to cast their shadows onto the floor, thus reflecting and expanding the sculpture in a wholly idiosyncratic interplay of transparency and opacity, material solidity and immaterial yet precisely legible nothingness: the resultant sketch, formed by shadows on the floor, becomes an integral component of the sculpture…
In all of these artworks, and especially in the way the two artists have arranged the pieces to create an installation, the intervention is not so much a classical art exhibition in a space, but its opposite: here, art temporarily redefines and reshapes the space. The idea of the architectonic expands to include the notion of an artistic commentary in a novel and collaborative spatial image.
Thomas Elsen / Übersetzung: Howard Fine