Message #825

Name:	A. Goodman
Date:	Saturday July 1, 2006 4:26:01 am MDT
Subject:	”Weltinnenraum” (Worldly Interior)
Message:	Hansik Gebert has been creating his “work in progress” since 1980. This multimedia confrontation between himself, his time and the time of others comprises drawings, paintings, photography and films, as well as text material. “Work in progress” describes a method of work that allows the body of work to steadily grow and mutate by means of augmentation via new works, as well as through retrievals and quotes from an extant fund of artwork. The inducement for the presented staging at the Kunstverein Rhein-Sieg was the eccentricity of the location: a building that extends deep into the earth containing largely windowless spaces that, by means of a floorgrille, can be looked through and are connected by metal stairs and walkways, which makes everything accessible. The title of the exhibition: Weltinnenraum / Worldly Interior. The exhibition location and title are also the first content-related components of the staging. Here, Hansik Gebert uses a literary text, his novella “Die Arbeit des Steins (The Workings of Stone)” as a point of departure for representational statements without, however, using it to illustrate the text. On the contrary, both means of expression complement each other. The book generates images through language, and the exhibited representational spaces of the exhibition must generate language in order to be heard. Level one:The top space, the only one provided with large windows, shows three black rectangles on the walls and, placed laterally or above them, a bronze object respectively. This forms the first, quick impression. Around the bronze wedges, upon which a little human head has been placed on the upper ends, damage to the wall, dust and mortar can be seen. Were the sharp objects knocked into the wall, or did they strike the wall, like a sudden flash of insight? On closer inspection, the black areas can be made out to be latex panels, soft, pliable. Has thought here violently struck the obstacle, the impenetrable wall, and, in so doing, only just missed the resilient membrane? The exhibition is called worldly interior! The path leads further into the interior, a look through the floor-grille leads down to the two lower levels: Level two; Level three...First, there is a space with austere drawings. Black and white, they reveal architectural structures, distorted spaces, corridors. Here and there are pictographs of a head. The grouping of drawings reflects, in content and realistically, both the exhibition space and the viewer. Concurrently, the drawings make reference to the novella “Die Arbeit des Steins,” which has been published in a special edition illustrated with them to accompany the exhibition, and in which the protagonist understands himself to be the nucleus of his cell, acting out his being as potential in the worldly interior. In their lower section, the drawings reveal a numeric code that can be decoded with the help of one of them – a further clue to the artist’s pattern of action, which becomes accessible through the viewer’s speculative linguistic participation. Level three: Five wooden panels with a kind of filmic sequence of images. Before the desire to decipher them gets the upper hand, attention is drawn by an object that extends from the end wall into the space: a larger-than-life axe whose impact has left a clear-cut gouge in the wall, then becoming stuck there. This precision, caused by a human tool, creates the connection to the initial impressions, the projectile-like bronze wedges, embedded in the wall. Between the two types of force, one unwieldy, the other intentional, an area takes shape for an independently ordered red and black vibrating image sequence on the wall. Calculated irregularities in the spacing and grouping cause the floor to sway when briefly viewed. The extended path leads to a small corridor, a catwalk over a trench; the wall is marked with black squares – at the back end is a small atrium. Upon reaching it, one stands before a mirror to which a black latex strip has been applied at the viewer’s eye level, and which hinders a look into one’s own eyes. The atrium has no exit - one must turn back; the light at the end of the walkway has led to a dead end. A staircase leads over a bridge back upstairs. Moving past a large collaged drawing, alongside of which a three-dimensional miniature of a room with an undefined perspective grows out of the wall, the viewer once again reaches the outside world. An impressive presentation of Hansik Gebert’s complete archived works can be found online at: http://www.hansikgebert.de To mark the end of the exhibition, Barbara Teuber will read from the novella “Die Arbeit des Steins,” which is being published on the occasion of the exhibition: Hansik Gebert, Die Arbeit des Steins, 150 pp. ital. paperback,10 illus., €15 ISBN 3 - 86582 - 273 - 8 Special edition with a hand drawing, edition of 50, for €50 at the exhibition. Press release from the Kunstverein Rhein Sieg eV, Siegburg ,Germany

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