Category: Art

The artist is known for his highly political practice which addresses social issues through sculpture, performance, and video, with the intention of highlighting individual agency and fostering dialog about global politics. In his latest body of work, Reyes explores the complexities of American history with a collection of carved stone sculptures, rendered in volcanic stone, jadeite, and white marble, that allude to the plethora of symbolic objects from Mayan, Olmec, Toltec, and Mexican heritages. Using the artistic and architectural language and geometric vocabulary of pre-Columbian civilizations, his totemic, abstract sculptures are a socio-political critique of the United States of America and the larger continent it occupies, as well as its history of enslavement and its genocide of Indigenous Peoples. Carving into the spirituality of stone, with the sculpture series, Reyes further aims to bring an ancient practice to the fore, exalting a discipline that dates back over 35 centuries. “I am fascinated by the resilience of direct carving in stone. Once a stone has been carved, it earns its permanent place in the world,” he says.

Founded by Hannes Lippert in 2018, the German studio uses emerging digital technologies and techniques to create mesmerizing fictional worlds informed by contemporary shapes and objects. Their stunning portfolio is a combination of commissioned projects for clients such as Wallpaper*, Jacquemus, HD Buttercup, and Vaust, as well as personal works, including the eye-catching settings of ‘A Home of Silence’ and ‘La Maison Dans L’Enclave’. Broad-ranging and eerily enticing in their distinct aesthetics, their digital works explore new directions of set design, lighting, and studies of materiality, in which sculptural objects, works of art, and furnishings sit together to create new and unexpected interactions. Integrating nature and blending it with fictional architecture, Form & Rausch aims to create unique, contemplative environments, marked by the presence of both a playful realism and more ambiguous shapes that fleetingly escape definition. Highlights include ‘REND‘, a digital exhibition in collaboration with New York-based studio TRNK, and interior projects in collaboration with designer Charlotte Taylor, such as ‘Tiled House’ and ‘Gravel Residence’; presented below amongst other impressive examples.

Directed by cofounder Huth and set to be displayed at Berlin’s renowned exhibition space König Galerie, their latest creation is ‘VS01 (Vertical Stabilizer 01)’; a sculptural artwork part of their ongoing IBICF series resembling a vertical stabilizer—the control surface on the tail of airplanes, helicopters, and other aerodynamically steered machines, whose distinctive fin-like shape improves the directional stability of the vehicle. Made from polished stainless steel and available in a 11-pieces limited edition, the industrial object addresses the connections between artistic creation and the world we live in, while giving viewers space to acknowledge moments of transition and reflect on the emotions that have shaped our experiences of the present and past year—the fin as an object of the zeitgeist, of the COVID-19 immobilized movement and the shifts it catalyzed, but also of progress, hope, and change.

With its ever-changing and reflective mirror surface, the artwork functions as a fleeting record of our surroundings, in which images appear and disappear, just to reappear—a glance at our past but also an anticipatory view of what is yet to come, of places we haven’t been to. We chat with co-founder Sascha Huth from his Berlin office to learn more about the motivations behind the astonishing stabilizer and comprehend the studio’s aim to utilize art as a tool to reinforce society, and transcend creative and social boundaries.

You’ve said, “I see my practice as being layered with a multitude of different progressional themes, which all live side by side in both my theoretical and my practical work.” Can you talk a little about what these themes are, and how you seek to portray them through sculpture and installation?

The different layers that I work with represent mostly theoretical aspects that lie “behind” the art pieces. I try very hard to keep my work as neutral as possible and my subjectivity out of the way. But the layers I often implement are classical elements, such as how one applies foreground, middleground, and background. In many of my works where I use color as a layer on top of a material, I use black. Black as a color, abstractly speaking, inherently describes the“I try very hard to keep my work as neutral as possible and my subjectivity out of the way” background and when one pulls it out into the room, a certain innate energy arises: as one tries to perceive the form, it constantly fights to become a shape, a silhouette, two-dimensional. This constant “pull” is for me like the visual equivalent to magnetism or gravity and also brings liminality—the realization of being between two states, or transitioning—into the physical world and work.

Another layer is perception. Recently, I have revived a theme that was my starting point as an artist—Trompe-l’œil or the deceiving of the eye; a Renaissance theme that sought to question the viewer’s perception of what was real. An example of this is my wall drawing ’Four Circles (v)’. There is a point in the space from where it seems that four black circles are stacked neatly in the corner of the room. When moving away from this point, the perceived circles start to deconstruct themselves and warp, showing that it is composed of half-circles painted onto angular meeting walls. 

Presenting a comprehensive analysis of the significance of this “divided postmodernism”, ‘Anything Goes ?’ focuses on the reevaluation of urban design, its backdrops and main players, in both parts of Berlin. In the GDR (German Democratic Republic), also knowns as East Berlin, “one essential reason for the new focus on architectural traditions was a desire for a more visible presence of the past,” explains the gallery, adding that, “likewise, an enduring housing shortage played an important role, [with] concepts for revedelopment also addressing old buildings, which had been neglected until then.” “The connection to the past was to give people a sense of identity and belonging”From restoration of old buildings to new references to history via facade constructions with gables, bay windows, and reliefs, “the connection to the past was to give people a sense of identity and belonging.”

In the Eastern part of the city, developments centered on historicist reconstructions and large prefabricated housing developments characterized by concrete-slab high-rises in the city’s peripheries. In West Berlin, these centered on small-scale projects by internationally renowned architects of the time, which introduced new memorial sites, design elements, and urban housing types, such as multi-family villas, to the western part of the capital.

Fascinated by the representational and compositional aspects of architecture, Spanish architect de La Fuente’s work has extended predominantly to digital art, with intriguing and visually-striking outcomes. Starting out, the digital medium allowed her to experiment with designs and ideas, without having to translate her visions into tangible, physical realities. “When you are young and inexperienced it is very difficult to give voice to your ideas in the architecture world; 3D gave me that voice I needed,” she tells IGNANT. Today, de la Fuente aims to emphasize the interconnection of the two fields through an experimental approach to architecture in the form of digital art installations. “For me, architecture and digital art share not only the same objectives, such as the material expression of an idea of place, but can contribute a lot to each other,” she says.

The artist has redesigned the series to suit the scale of the space, with a group of monumental candles acting as sculptures, that were lit on the first day of the exhibition. The series includes a life-size replica of a famous sculpture, Giambologna’s ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1579-1582),’ an effigy of the artist Rudolf Stingel (Fischer’s friend and peer) and a collection of different chairs, ranging from a stool, to a plastic chair and an airline seat. “Before being lit, this ensemble of candles encapsulates mastery, realism, verticality, and virtuosity but over the course of the exhibition, as the candles burn, these values ​​are inverted by the workings of chance and entropy: the sculpture becomes informal, even formless,” explains a statement from the gallery. Unpacking themes of transience, transformation, and creative destruction, the pieces gradually disintegrate and trickle away, all the while still continuing to enchant the space and the viewer.

The firm designed the building as a monolithic bespoke container with three entrances, wrapped in a charred Accoya timber rainscreen to blend in with its natural surroundings. The pavilion was built using the Japanese joinery construction and wood-charring technique Shou Sugi Ban, a method of timber coloring and preservation which lends the building’s exterior a textural quality. Designed to naturally acquire a patina over time, the weathering silver facade emphasizes the passing of time and the temporality of the artwork housed within its walls. Behind it is a white gallery space, sized to match the proportions of ‘London Cross’ and its 15-ton plates of weathering steel. Inside, the artwork takes center stage with one plate running along the floor and the other suspended overhead. A roof with sawtooth north-facing skylights distribute soft lighting into the pavilion, minimizing shadows and harmonizing the controlled nature of the gallery with the feeling of being outdoors.

The black and white photographs are intended to denote specific narratives, and to make the viewers stop, observe, and reflect. In the physical form of the installation, mirrors placed in front of the images blur a direct view of the photographs, allowing countless perspectives and perceptions of what is depicted. “I try to use the capacity of image to reveal what is invisible to us,” Dolinšek explains; “to discover an aspect in things and objects that got lost within the depths of our own perception.” Paired with sound, the series depicts a feeling of inanimate nature in decay. “The work [however] is not about any environmental past, present, or future crisis,” the photographer remarks. “With this series, I question the reasons behind these anomalies, how people cope with them and what feelings they trigger.”

The work visually explores our complex relationship with our bodies, through presenting distorted perceptions of the human form. “These contorted nudes delicately transform what should be intimately familiar into foreign sculptures,” explains Rosser. In the images, the viewer can see how the subjects interact as they push against and support one another. Photographing bodies whose heads and hands, necks and limbs, are obscured through tricks of contortion and lens angle, Rosser transforms the familiarity of flesh into something new. Spanning from 20 to 70 years of age, her diverse, headless subjects positioned in domestic spaces manage to shed all traces of identity. The selection of works below, shared courtesy of Elizabeth Houston Gallery, show Rosser’s tender gaze that only asks us to question the associations we make between physical traits and the gender binary.