Endlich Skulptur
Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva
17.05. - 05.07.2024

Exhibited works:
Loop I - IV, 2017

Artists:
Etti Abergel, Sunah Choi, Wade Guyton, Jim Lambie, Marzena Nowak, Rudolf Polanszky, Christopher Williams, Erwin Wurm

The title Endlich Skulptur (At Last Sculpture) is a slight provocation, as if sculpture were missing from Mezzanin's programme. This exhibition is an opportunity to revisit one of the strange destinies of the practice of sculpture. For a very long time, sculptors have been talking about the commercial fragility of their practice, compared with the ease with which painters distribute their work to collectors. Sometimes they even see this as a feature that distinguishes them from others, in a long tradition of arrant, unrecognised work. Sculpture at last! And yet nothing like it.

Indeed, in this succession of works by artists as diverse as (in alphabetical order) Etti Abergel, Sunah Choi, Wade Guyton, Jim Lambie, Marzena Nowak, Rudolf Polanszky, Christopher Williams and Erwin Wurm, it's a safe bet that none of them would appreciate seeing their work 'reduced' to sculpture. It has to be said that sculpture has been one of the battlegrounds of modernity. In this, the anniversary year of Surrealism, how can we fail to remember that it was in this context that art had to free itself from the object, or at least reflect on its proximity to it. From object to sculpture, no filter of representation is necessary. Sculpture has become the object par excellence, but it is still perceived as the most classical, even traditional form of art. Brancusi was a friend of Duchamp.

In the search for a possible name for a practice that is so obvious that it only deconstructs itself, it's easy to think of objects, assemblages, perspectives, deployments and installations. It's as if sculpture had become diluted in space, joining painting in its conceptual destiny. This exhibition, somewhat playfully and unpretentiously, revisits one of the semantic expectations of the practice. For everyone, sculpture remains the artistic expression of volume and the attempt to reflect on its perception.

Presented here is a series of works that divert and play on this idea and its various variations through the effect of transparency. While some pieces are transparent in the strict sense of the word, others give rise to volumes or encourage us to try to perceive what lies beneath the surface of things. The ideal sculpture could be like a cut through the familiar and the commonplace, a demonstration of the notion of counter-relief, the vision of an object through or through, a landscape of proximity.

Although the world is not flat, for us it is very often an image, a surface. Our bodies, our movements, our spatial interactions and our objects are reduced to their skins. Almost paradoxically, all too often, our emotions fail to live up to their promises, our thoughts crash into surfaces. Everything freezes and nothing moves. The gallery empties and the objects clutter us up again.

Endlich Skulptur sounds like a keyword for assembling fragments, cutting up volumes, shifting perceptions of objects, putting a desire back into motion - in short, sculpture!

Samuel Gross

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