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拍品專文
Executed in 1945 while Schwitters was living in exile in England, Schweres Relief (Heavy Relief) is one of the largest and finest examples of the artist's late work. It marks a highpoint of a great flowering period of creativity when, living under impoverished and difficult circumstances, Schwitters began to work with a renewed vigour forging a new structural logic to his work by fusing old and new techniques.
Comprising both organic and geometric shapes heavily textured with plaster, Heavy Relief is a work that has both grown out of, and which openly reflects, the many areas of Schwitters' prodigious and wide-ranging creativity. One of the finest examples of the artist's late style that suddenly flourished in the Lake District after several troubled years of isolation, internment and exile, Heavy Relief is a culminatory work that eloquently articulates a fusion of his former achievements with the natural environment of his new rural surroundings.
Throughout the 1930s Schwitters had spent much time visiting his son Ernst in Norway. There, immersed in nature and the rural environment of the Moldefjord, natural and organic forms had grown increasingly prevalent in his work; their fluid linearity being incorporated into the constructivism of his work in a way that generated a new, strange and fascinating geometry. It is a unique and elemental seeming geometry emphasized particularly in the series of plaster sculptures that Schwitters made throughout his career and where, usually in a vertical format, a simple plaster form articulates a sense of an organic or elemental logic of construction.
Schwitters' return to a natural environment with his move to Ambleside in the Lake District in 1945 similarly inspired and awoke in his work a deep feeling for natural and organic form that had remained more muted during his recent years in London. Indeed, it was an element that soon came to dominate his work of these last years and which was to culminate in the vast relief he made in a disused barn in Elterwater in 1947 but never finished. This third Merzbau, the so-called Merzbarn, was intended to represent the ultimate fusion of nature and the constructivist logic of Merz assemblage.
A large relief laid out on a monochrome white plaster background Heavy Relief is one of the triumphant examples of Schwitters' work from this culminating period in Schwitters' life and work. With its wooden circles recalling the constructivsm of the Merzbilds of the 1920s (as well as the art of former friends and colleagues like Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky) it in part seems to echo the mathematical geometry that underpinned Schwitters' earlier more doctrinaire 'International Constructivist' style. With its sparse conglomeration of disparate, intriguing and enigmatic elements laid out on a white rectangle, it is also a work that in some respects seems to recall such other bold constructions of simple found elements as Merzbild Kjkduin of 1923 or the Kleines Seemannsheim of 1926. At the same time, however, unlike these earlier works, the increased abstraction of Heavy Relief, caused by the ambiguous and non-urban nature of what are both found and man-made elements, generates an underlying sense of a cohesive natural order in the work that is wholly absent in such earlier Merzbilds.
Part relief, part assemblage, part Merzbild, part sculpture, the appropriately-named Heavy Relief is one of Schwitters' most powerful statements about Merz's unfailing ability to evolve and integrate its aesthetic into all areas of life and into ever new and surprising surroundings and environments.
Comprising both organic and geometric shapes heavily textured with plaster, Heavy Relief is a work that has both grown out of, and which openly reflects, the many areas of Schwitters' prodigious and wide-ranging creativity. One of the finest examples of the artist's late style that suddenly flourished in the Lake District after several troubled years of isolation, internment and exile, Heavy Relief is a culminatory work that eloquently articulates a fusion of his former achievements with the natural environment of his new rural surroundings.
Throughout the 1930s Schwitters had spent much time visiting his son Ernst in Norway. There, immersed in nature and the rural environment of the Moldefjord, natural and organic forms had grown increasingly prevalent in his work; their fluid linearity being incorporated into the constructivism of his work in a way that generated a new, strange and fascinating geometry. It is a unique and elemental seeming geometry emphasized particularly in the series of plaster sculptures that Schwitters made throughout his career and where, usually in a vertical format, a simple plaster form articulates a sense of an organic or elemental logic of construction.
Schwitters' return to a natural environment with his move to Ambleside in the Lake District in 1945 similarly inspired and awoke in his work a deep feeling for natural and organic form that had remained more muted during his recent years in London. Indeed, it was an element that soon came to dominate his work of these last years and which was to culminate in the vast relief he made in a disused barn in Elterwater in 1947 but never finished. This third Merzbau, the so-called Merzbarn, was intended to represent the ultimate fusion of nature and the constructivist logic of Merz assemblage.
A large relief laid out on a monochrome white plaster background Heavy Relief is one of the triumphant examples of Schwitters' work from this culminating period in Schwitters' life and work. With its wooden circles recalling the constructivsm of the Merzbilds of the 1920s (as well as the art of former friends and colleagues like Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky) it in part seems to echo the mathematical geometry that underpinned Schwitters' earlier more doctrinaire 'International Constructivist' style. With its sparse conglomeration of disparate, intriguing and enigmatic elements laid out on a white rectangle, it is also a work that in some respects seems to recall such other bold constructions of simple found elements as Merzbild Kjkduin of 1923 or the Kleines Seemannsheim of 1926. At the same time, however, unlike these earlier works, the increased abstraction of Heavy Relief, caused by the ambiguous and non-urban nature of what are both found and man-made elements, generates an underlying sense of a cohesive natural order in the work that is wholly absent in such earlier Merzbilds.
Part relief, part assemblage, part Merzbild, part sculpture, the appropriately-named Heavy Relief is one of Schwitters' most powerful statements about Merz's unfailing ability to evolve and integrate its aesthetic into all areas of life and into ever new and surprising surroundings and environments.