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拍品專文
A beguiling architectonic form standing over two metres in height, Wiese (1990) is part of the seminal series of concrete sculptures Isa Genzken created between 1986 and 1991. Evolving from experiments in rough-hewn plaster, Genzken’s use of concrete offered a rich, tactile dialogue with the fabric of the built environment, allowing her to investigate the ways in which architecture informs and reflects our social and material reality. As with other works from the series, Wiese is raised on a custom-made steel plinth, inviting an eye-level engagement with the object. The three-sided concrete form wraps around an open interior space. It is fluted like a section of classical column, and cut across by horizontal fissures. These seams are a result of Genzken’s casting process, whereby irregular, sequential layers of concrete were poured from above into a mould. They lend the sculpture a poignant delicacy at odds with its material’s monumental associations. Other works from this important series are in major museum collections, including Bild (Painting) (1989, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Fenster (Window) (1990, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main).
Having first made her name in the 1970s with her lance-shaped ‘Ellipsoid’ and ‘Hyperbolo’ sculptures, which toyed with the precision-engineered aesthetics of Minimalism, Genzken turned to plaster and subsequently concrete structures in a deliberate move away from formal rigour. Contrasting with the sleek perfection of Minimalist and Modernist surfaces, the hand-made, fragmentary quality of the concrete works spoke to a sense of disillusionment and collapse that characterised the postmodern landscape of 1980s Europe. They were at once beautiful, austere and richly evocative, echoing the industrial wreckage of post-war Germany, pre-fabricated Eastern Bloc housing, and, perhaps most poignantly, the dividing line of the Berlin Wall—which, by the time the present work was made, had fallen.
In the manner that defines much of her work, Genzken captures these social, political and economic implications in a sculpture of compellingly human scale. Wiese offers an intimate spatial experience, proposing personal and narrative identification. ‘I’d already made works in concrete that look like churches, ruins and bombed-out buildings’, the artist has explained. ‘… If you walk around them, you can discern different stories, find hard-to-reach nooks and crannies, areas that feel more secure. I was also quite explicitly playing with the idea of ruins and a Caspar David Friedrich kind of mood.’ While she titles many of her works after architectural elements such as pavilions or windows, others, including columns named for fellow artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Kai Althoff, refer to her friends and loved ones. Wiese is the surname of Genzken’s favourite aunt. Diedrich Diederichsen has observed her sculptures’ ‘tendency to become characters, as if they had a soul’ (I. Genzken in conversation with D. Diederichsen, in Isa Genzken, London 2006, pp. 29, 27).
Having first made her name in the 1970s with her lance-shaped ‘Ellipsoid’ and ‘Hyperbolo’ sculptures, which toyed with the precision-engineered aesthetics of Minimalism, Genzken turned to plaster and subsequently concrete structures in a deliberate move away from formal rigour. Contrasting with the sleek perfection of Minimalist and Modernist surfaces, the hand-made, fragmentary quality of the concrete works spoke to a sense of disillusionment and collapse that characterised the postmodern landscape of 1980s Europe. They were at once beautiful, austere and richly evocative, echoing the industrial wreckage of post-war Germany, pre-fabricated Eastern Bloc housing, and, perhaps most poignantly, the dividing line of the Berlin Wall—which, by the time the present work was made, had fallen.
In the manner that defines much of her work, Genzken captures these social, political and economic implications in a sculpture of compellingly human scale. Wiese offers an intimate spatial experience, proposing personal and narrative identification. ‘I’d already made works in concrete that look like churches, ruins and bombed-out buildings’, the artist has explained. ‘… If you walk around them, you can discern different stories, find hard-to-reach nooks and crannies, areas that feel more secure. I was also quite explicitly playing with the idea of ruins and a Caspar David Friedrich kind of mood.’ While she titles many of her works after architectural elements such as pavilions or windows, others, including columns named for fellow artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Kai Althoff, refer to her friends and loved ones. Wiese is the surname of Genzken’s favourite aunt. Diedrich Diederichsen has observed her sculptures’ ‘tendency to become characters, as if they had a soul’ (I. Genzken in conversation with D. Diederichsen, in Isa Genzken, London 2006, pp. 29, 27).