NERO MAGAZINE » Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture

Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture

October 22 – December 11, 2011
De Vleeshal - Postbus 201 – Middelburg

curated by Lorenzo Benedetti

In recent years sculpture seems to be more and more at the centre of a series of researches that a new generation of artists has undertaken. The exhibition Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture tries to highlight some of these views such as, for example, the relationship between image and sculpture, in which we can see how the physical dimension of the piece is contrasted with the illusionistic dimension of the image. Through sculpture, a part of the new generation of artists is confronting the physical, material, and spatial dimensions with a post-conceptual stance. The exalted ecstasy of a technological aesthetic is put into question by David Jablonowski, who through his sculptures highlights the permanent obsolete character of technology while art seems to be heading in the opposite direction. This almost post-technological aesthetic, in which an aesthetic form seems to display a contemporary exposition, is present in its most existential dimension in the works by the duo Astali/Peirce, in which a polyurethane floor seems to have eliminated its icon through a strong material transformation.

Research of the elements of the past drawn from modernism are present in Eva Berendes, who is committed to the research of an abstract language. On one hand the monumentalism of geometry, on the other volumes that question the two-dimensional and three-dimensional relationship between sculpture and image. In the work by Italo Zuffi a tension between industrial formality and traditional sculptural research is present. A contrast between the absurd in art and the technical functionality that identifies a situation that hangs in the balance between abstraction and the reproduction of technological structure. The relationship with the context is put into question in the piece by Koenraad Dedobbeleer who has for some years concentrated on the more conceptual aspect of sculpture, stressing a dissociative relationship arising from a drift of reality. In his sculptures and installations there are poetic/narrative references. Guillaume Leblon concentrates his research in the dialectic between formalism and a dimension that leads to an evocative situation of the sculpture. His work is tied to the temporal and existential dimension of form and of time in sculpture. Michael Dean contrasts text and form, his sculptures always characterized by formal dialogue between language and form. His contribution to the exhibition Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture investigates precisely the contrast between image and sculpture with a confrontation of the contextualization of locus.

With: Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Italo Zuffi, Tolia Astali/Dylan Peirce, Guillaume Leblon, Eva Berendes, Michael Dean, David Jablonowski.

Eva Berendes The Middelburg Curtain, 2011 texture, iron

David Jablonowski Multiple (Sushi Voucher), 2011 Mixed media fibre reinforced plasterboard, offset printing plates, Rotary Cyclostyle

David Jablonowski Disposition, 2010

David Jablonowski Multiple (Gestetner) 1.78:1, 2011 glass, fibre reinforced plasterboard, offset printing plates, foil, Gestetner Rotary Cyclostyle No. 6 stencil machine, Canon IP 2700 printer, red chili, red chili powder, laurel, star anise, peper, nutmeg, curcuma, curry led lights