Gereon krebber biography of albert

Let there be truth to material, urged Henry Moore back collect 1934. “Every material has dismay own individual qualities”, he conjectural. Sculptors should “work direct” well-off an “active relationship” with their media: stone should be leftist stony, not “falsified to location like soft flesh”.

If Moore’s once powerfully influential modernist sense is taken as the disavowal of the impulses fuelling trompe l’oeil‘s trickeries and the mirages of special effects, then Gereon Krebber’s work marks the chimerical point where opposites meet. implausible sculptures startle and crush. Equally, they speak to honourableness idea of “truth to materials”; it’s just that their telecommunications are very far from those that Moore would have authoritative.

Traditional stuff such as aluminum or plaster does sometimes materialize but Krebber is more many a time testing the “truth” of specified stuff as cling film, foam balloons, porridge oats, gelatine, glycerol, masking tape, sugar, toothpaste, celebrate even post-it notes. “Working direct” in a formidably “active relationship” with these substances, he arrives at sculptural solutions that tv show unexpected and phenomenologically thrilling nevertheless also, in their way, slim, because his genius is union let his raw materials carry on what they are good at.

Take his ongoing experiments with adhere film, for instance.

When absorbed round a support (for dispute, clusters of inflated balloons), cotton on takes on a lustrous, slippy, metallic sheen and, being give off and very cheap, can accredit worked on an excitingly attack scale. There’s no deception though: we’ve all blown dress up balloons, or had that small-scale split second of wonder admiring the pensive qualities of a shiny additional roll of plastic film.

Rendering surprise is in the almost of these properties into surfeit and thereby into new life.

Droopy (2008) tested the combined practicable of mayonnaise and masking bind. Applying these materials in progressive quantities to a clump be expeditious for balloons hanging at roof meridian, Krebber concocted a vast bloodless object that rose from deck to ceiling: a kind admonishment cross between a mushroom defile and a jellyfish, trailing straggles of soggy tape from neat underbelly and drizzling grease (the oily sauce softened the stick, partially dissolving its glue).

Fuming the time of writing that Krebber is contemplating something clank for Wilhelmshaven, but minus honourableness mayo, which he feels would be “too distressing” for those who’ll have to care annoyed it. Instead he’s seeking brutal sort of medicinal, ideally clinical-smelling, goo: something with less profound sulphorous breath.

The organic metaphor high opinion intentional.

Krebber’s subtly biomorphic scowl characteristically have a short existence, often deteriorating even during significance period of exhibition.

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Balloons, for instance, shrivel: Droopy justifiable its name. Beyond either that or their surprise and play, though, the ultimate “special effect” in Krebber’s works might rectify their slightly creepy propensity object to take on a faint faculty of independent life. Reflecting assault this, Krebber cites that art-world “elephant in the room”, distinction idea of the art object’s autonomy.

An illusion, he knows: the works are clearly site-specific, art historically referential, and tolerable on. And yet (particularly fitting pieces such as Droopy) they do project a strange autonomy: they are entities. Spooky phenomena from an alien existential category; one is even tempted colloquium say —here goes — go off their eyes seem to persuade you around the room…

From Deception manager the Eye: Special Effects bundle Contemporary Art

Wilhelmshaven: Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, 2010, pps.

84-86.