As I try to marry the rela­tion­ship between art and archi­tec­ture both styl­is­ti­cally and as a stu­dio prac­tice, I am find­ing myself being more inter­ested in sculp­ture that ques­tions the very struc­ture in which it is placed. The work of the artists below is sig­nif­i­cant because they con­stantly ques­tion the idea of the art gallery as a phys­i­cal space. They are ques­tion­ing the form of the venue which is usu­ally a white cube in which paint­ings are hung. This is a series of artists who are “bring­ing down the gallery walls.” These artists are, par­don for the cliché, ‘think­ing out­side the box’ in a lit­eral way but also metaphor­i­cally. And because no gallery or museum in their right mind will ever bring these artists together (imag­ine the con­struc­tion costs), I decided to curate this fic­tional show right here on Curbs and Stoops.

Felix Schramm: “Ger­man artist Felix Schramm cre­ates the illu­sion of archi­tec­ture gone awry. Made from dry­wall, paint, steel frames, and wood, his site-​specific instal­la­tions resem­ble the after­math of dis­as­ter inside the gallery, where the delin­eations between the work and the institution’s archi­tec­ture are dif­fi­cult to dis­cern. His twisted, splin­tered frag­ments of struc­tural forms — walls, ceil­ings, floors — burst from the building’s frame­work at dra­matic angles, pro­duc­ing large-​scale works that seem at once threat­en­ing and fragile.” — SF Moma.

Bap­tiste Debom­bourg: Bap­tiste Debom­bourg is a visual artist and sculp­tor based in Paris who grad­u­ated from the Ecole Nationale Superi­ure des Beaux Art de Paris. In a recent inter­view with Michal Novotny Babtiste stated “… I started out paint­ing and draw­ing at school, and I felt very frus­trated with the for­mat. I felt very dis­ap­pointed by the size. There­fore I decided to expe­ri­ence three dimen­sional work. Sartre says that objects are not just a pres­ence but that they exist in the same time as we do. I mean, they don’t exist in a human way, they’re not alive, but we share our exis­tence with them. For me to work in the dis­ci­pline of sculp­ture is a way in which to add some more exis­tence into objects. I like paint­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy as well, but there is still more I’d like to express with mate­r­ial in three dimensions.”

Erica Hock: “Erika Hock (born in 1981) is a young Ger­man artist who likes to break walls as she plays with their resis­tance. All that’s needed in fact is a belt to dam­age the clean and rigid geom­e­try of a hunk of wall. An approach that may well con­test the “infra­struc­tural ideas” that cur­rently per­me­ate mod­ern art.” –Cos­tume National

Rob­bie Row­lands: “Rob­bie Row­lands looks closely at the every­day objects around us, he ques­tions their nature, their sta­bil­ity. Work­ing both famil­iar and found mate­ri­als, Row­lands cuts into and manip­u­lates the recog­nis­able, peel­ing back one form to reveal another, reflect­ing upon the pas­sage of time and what lies beneath the sur­face of our famil­iar world.” –Rowland’s Blog

Urs Fis­cher: “In late 2007, Swiss-​born artist Urs Fis­cher took a jack­ham­mer to Gavin Brown’s pris­tine white West Vil­lage floors. A gal­lerist has got to have a lot of faith in an artist to let him rip through the con­crete, upend pipes, and fill the space with a huge open trench of dirt and debris…” — Interview Magazine

Tags: Baptiste Debombourg, Erica Hock, Felix Schramm, Robbie Rowlands, Urs Fischer

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Sculpture.
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