KölnSkulptur #11: Body Manoeuvres

Mary Bauermeister: Rübezahl, 2020
Natural materials, tree trunk, tree fungus, antlers, approx. 130 wooden chairs

Some of the 130 tree trunks that feature in Mary Bauermeister’s installation Rübezahl have served the artist for many years as places to sit in magic circles. Others were worked specifically for the Skulpturenpark Köln. The title of this piece refers to the eponymous mountain troll Rübezahl, who embodies the unpredictability of nature and influences the fate of humankind via the natural world. Bauermeister’s installation was conceived as a new heart for the park, inviting visitors to linger awhile and contemplate the power of their environment.

Tom Burr: No Access: cluster one (B, D, E, I, M), 2015/2017
Polished and blacked out stainless steel, alucobond, aluminum

Tom Burr is among the most relevant contemporary conceptual artists. His work shows contextual links with urban aesthetics, gay subculture, minimal art and avant-garde film. For KölnSkulptur #8, Burr assembled 26 black screens in a defined cluster in an area about the size of a handball field. Their number is derived from the alphabet. After the end of KölnSkulptur #8 the screens with the letters B, D, E, I and M are staying under the name No Access: Cluster one at a new place in the park. The objects were developed especially for this site. Their fronts show highly polished, darkened mirrors. On the back an ”X” of painted steel statically supports the construction. With No Access, Tom Burr unmistakably points to the digital surfaces of today. This is why he called the original ensemble also a Cluster of 26 Dead iPhones. The painters of the 17th and 18th century were already using framed mirrors, so-called ”Claude glasses”, to select views for their landscape paintings. Burr blows them up to create simple, stereometric and haunting shapes. This results in puzzling mirror reflections and bizarre spatial experiences.

James Lee Byars: Untitled (Sigmund Freud), 1989
Bronze, vergoldet

James Lee Byars began his intensive investigation of Zen-Buddhism in 1957. He incorporated his findings into his artistic work, which represents a symbiosis of Conceptual Art, Minimalism and Fluxus. Early on Byars attempted visual representations of existential concepts with the intention of enabling the viewer to experience silence and emptiness. Byars reduced his sculptural œuvre to forms with an obvious symbolism (cone, circle, sickle, cuboid) which he invested with a mystical dimension by painting them in red, gold or black. Perfection, beauty and immateriality are among the central concepts of this “magician of silence”.

Nina Canell: Power (Powerless), 2013
Power pole, reinforced concrete

Nina Canell’s works are characterized by an immediate fragility; plants, cable, glass, even powder are materials she uses in her sculptures. To these the artist has added electricity, which becomes visible in the form of lamps and neon tubes and, via the open structure of the way they are depicted, an element of danger is always allowed to resonate. With her giant installation Power (Powerless), Nina Canell—after her contribution to the exhibition Made in Germany in Hannover one year ago—now appears a second time in public space. Installed at the Skulpturenpark Köln, a veteran power pole is able to bring a state of powerlessness to expression via its monumentality and isolation as a single freestanding pylon. Utility poles in the serial alignment of many masts are an image that defines an industrial landscape. Our society’s network of maintenance is herein articulated. But when suddenly isolated, the object becomes a metaphor for an antithesis to energy and power. In the context of the park, this aspect is just as suddenly given a new meaning: the sculpture becomes the epitome of the un- or dis-connected. Isolated from the group system, the object is an expression of a place that is no longer in the loop, appears in isolation and so becomes an image of another world, here specifically targeted.

Edith Dekyndt: The Fences, 2015
Kupferfolie

Edith Dekyndt is a Belgian artist who deals with ephemeral and transitory phenomena. In some of her works she explores the workings of light, wind and tidal movements. For her, sculpture means succinct and quiet intervention, not snappy or possession-taking edification. This is why she works with what already exists as part of the park-environment. She applies copper foil to the high metal grids of the entrance gates. At the beginning the gates shine like majestic trellises, but as time passes they will eventually turn a blueish verdigris, caused by patina oxidation. Dekyndt shows us the dichotomies of value and decay, time and disappearance, substance and appearance.

Bogomir Ecker: Ohr, 1986
Sheet iron, lacquered

Bogomir Ecker who has shown at documenta and is a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, made his name with art in public spaces and context-related sculptures and installations. His works are characterised by an input of scientific points of view. Their themes are sense perception and communication, in particular sight and hearing, and they are frequently technical or apparatus-like in character, without being centred on technology for its own sake. It is rather the medium through whose putative recognition-value the viewer is induced to adopt unaccustomed perspectives.

Ayşe Erkmen: Lonesome George, 2020
Bronze

For fourteen years, Lonely George, the loneliest snail in the world, lived in a laboratory on Hawaii. For this entire period, scientists tried unsuccessfully to find it a mate. When he died in 2019, the species he belonged to, Achatinella apexfulva, died out with him. Erkmen’s Lonesome George is the smallest sculpture ever to be shown at the Skulpturenpark Köln. Her work refers to species extinction and acts as a memorial to the mollusc, which attracted a great deal of attention, albeit futile, once he became the sole representative of his kind.
Over the course of two years, the smallest sculpture in the Skulpturenpark Köln was encapsulated by the London plane tree (Platanus hispanica) and embedded in the tree. Lonesome George exists on, protected and invisible inside the tree in the sculpture park.

Fischli/Weiss: Garten, 1997/1999
Concrete, stones

Peter Fischli and David Weiss have worked as an artistic team, always with a healthy dash of self-irony and humour, since 1979, and they are among the most influential contemporary artists in the multi-media field in Switzerland. The two Zurichers first attracted international notice at documenta 8 in 1987 with their film Der Lauf der Dinge. Garten is one of a series of Concrete Landscapes, of which the first, smaller, versions appeared in 1984. With their somehow crude and archaic feel, these landscapes seem to have been exposed to erosion since the dawn of time, and yet the material is a modern one, which – to the great delight of the artists – merely has to be left in a raw, untreated state to look so old.

Sou Fujimoto: Garden Gallery, 2011
Concrete

The Garden Gallery of Sou Fujimoto can be viewed as the Sculpture Park’s new trademark. In any case the architectural structure, in its size and proportion, sets a new criterion for the park including the works of sculpture found in it. From inside the structure, new sight lines open up and views of the park from its windows appear like framed landscapes, while, on the other hand, the visitor is lured into its enclosure by the tree and Rheinwein, the relief sculpture by Hubert Kiecol. The ground has been left in its natural unpaved state and in this way retains the tension between inside and outside space. In its relationship to the park, the Garden Gallery represents an architectural counterpart to the Foundation’s building; Sou Fujimoto’s work creates a balance between the two dominating buildings on the grounds. This is Sou Fujimoto’s first architectural structure in Europe. Sou Fujimoto has also designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013 in Kensington Gardens/London.

Dan Graham: Greek Cross Labyrinth, 2001
Two-way mirror-glass, stainless steel frame, stainless steel perforated sheets

After working as journalist, photographer, art-theorist and gallery owner, Dan Graham only turned to a career in the arts in the mid-1960s. His first efforts were literary works with a conceptual background, then films and performances, and from 1970 video installations in which the viewer himself became the object of his own reflection. Since the 1976 Venice Biennale he has worked in terms of open-air installations, using walls of glass and mirror glass to create complex, partly isolating effects of self-observation. The formal elegance and the depth of meaning of his work makes him one of the most important conceptual artists of the present day.

Lena Henke: The Doors, 2013
UV print on plastic, steel

Lena Henke’s work brings quite unusual materials into the Skulpturenpark Köln, which stand out clearly against the nature reference of most of the other works. Stainless steel frames and printed rubber mats are motifs derived from an urban life of experience. In the park these seem to be citing another world. The images show graffiti depicting some famous photographs by George Brassaï that, when enlarged, look on the one hand like archaic creatures, while the flow of the rubber mats and their repetition, on the other hand, remind us of film clips.

Jenny Holzer: Ambition is just …, 1997
Sandstone, four benches

The work of Jenny Holzer is always addressed to a broad public. In 1977 she carried out her first anonymous poster campaign with so-called Truisms, self-evident truths and “sound, common sense” statements. Other mediums such as benches, stickers or T-shirts were soon added. In 1982 she used the electronic signboard on Times Square in New York. In her works she pursues the goal of subverting the messages of the advertising and media worlds, exploiting the reading and seeing habits of passers-by to confront them with surprising messages. In 1990 she received the Golden Lion as the first American artist at the Venice Biennale.

Leiko Ikemura: Katzenmädchen mit r(h)ein-Blick, 1999
Bronze, concrete

Leiko Ikemura studied sculpture and painting in Spain, and in 1979 settled in Zürich, before finally moving to Cologne in 1985. After beginning with lively, dreamlike drawings and paintings she turned in 1987 to sculpture as her central medium. Since then she has made figures – mostly female – who fluctuate between two conditions, on the one hand they seem unfinished, on the other still in a state of becoming. Their undecided condition thematizes her fear of losing her cultural identity, and also a deep understanding of human nature – her figures are also commuters across the border, mediators between Japanese and Western culture.

Anish Kapoor: Untitled, 1997
Steel, polished

At the Venice Biennale in 1990 Anish Kapoor represented Great Britain, and today he is one of the most prominent artists working in British Sculpture. The many-sided work of the 1991 Turner Prize winner is highly regarded internationally, not least because he combines the spiritual traditions of India with the idea of the sublime from the Western tradition in art. Since his first sculptures using colour pigments Kapoor has always crossed the borders between the genres. His method of working is that of a sculptor, but the themes of his sculptures – emptiness, transformation, immateriality, faith or passion – go far beyond questions of form and derive from painting.

Stefan Kern: Ohne Titel (Tribüne), 1996
Aluminum, lacquer, steel

Stefan Kern locates his works with fine irony on the borderline between art and design, between the pure aesthetics of the object and practical usefulness, thus addressing the old question of the “function” of art. His works are formally related to models such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt or Carl Andre, but they seriously subvert the excessively theory-bound strategies of Minimal Art, in that Kern makes art in the form of “furnishings” accessible and available for practical use. His works are mostly objects or installations, e.g. speaker’s lectern or a form of seating of decidedly communicative and physically responsive character.

Hubert Kiecol: Rheinwein, 2011
Steel, powder-coated

The work Rheinwein was created for the interior wall of the Garden Gallery by Fujimoto and, with its black frame elements, represents a graphic contrast to the architecture, whose window motifs it also quotes. The recognizability of the motif is intended to establish a connection between the Garden Gallery and the park and create a relationship across the dimensions of the park.

Klara Lidén: Harvest Moon, 2013
Yew (Taxus baccata)

In 2011 Klara Lidén was nominated for the prize of the National Gallery in Berlin. On this occasion, she produced a work for the outdoor area of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, a yew hedge, trimmed to the contours of a dumpster. Since the yews in Berlin do not allow transplantation, a new yew hedge was planted here with the help of a Cologne landscape gardener, so that now the work is on show in a second version. At this site a container sculpture by Sofia Hultén had formerly stood for KölnSkulptur #6. Now in the exact same place, Klara Lidén’s work stands and in this way links visitors’ memories.

Dane Mitchell: Post hoc, 2019/2020
Two cell tower pine trees, each comprising: galvanized steel, mild steel, aluminium, plastic, antenna, solid state drive, mesh network, MP3 player, amplifier, speakers and electrical components

Dane Mitchell has worked with a company who produce fake-tree telecommunication towers, used across the world by the telecommunication and surveillance industries to camouflage technology in the landscape, to realise a work that announces and transmits a list handmade by the artist of lost, extinct and disappeared entities and phenomena (approximately 260 categories). The list, which takes over six months to read, is uttered by an electronic voice and can be heard from the two trees in the park or listened to by way of the WIFI network generated by the cell-trees. Post hoc takes a look at the implications of the disappearance. To join the network, select the Posthoc network, open a browser and type posthoc.co.

Jorge Pardo: Tomatensuppe, 1997
Plexiglass, iron, lacquer

Deep probing examination of the borders between art and architecture, design and sculpture, the everyday and aesthetic autonomy is characteristic of the work of Jorge Pardo. Living today in Los Angeles and New York, he moves majestically between genres. His objects, installations and pictures seem to be familiar and draw in the viewer, and yet they open up a wide field of associations. Are they readymades, designer objects or architectural sculpture? Pardo calls the nature of his work into question by integrating everyday life into his art in beautiful colours, “very cool, not at all emotional”.

Mandla Reuter: Der Park, 2011
Platanus hispanica

Mandla Reuter has planted a tree in the park and given the work the title The Park. What seems like a tautology is, at a closer look, a depiction that inquires into the origin of the park, whether it or this tree was there first, a tree the visitors encounter in the middle of their path. The plane tree introduces this question à-la-Magritte that queries our perception of reality.

Michael Sailstorfer: Hoher Besuch – Köln, 2009
Helicopter, paint, electric motor

A helicopter has landed on the roof of the main building of the Stiftung Skulpturenpark Köln. Where has the helicopter come from? What is its destination and who is aboard? Hoher Besuch – Köln (High-Ranking Visit – Cologne) is the title of the sculpture by Michael Sailstorfer, a French SE 3160 Alouette 111, with a white outerskin and painted black windows, whose engine has been replaced by a silent electric motor. For special occasions the helicopter’s rotor can be activated and rotates almost noiselessly, as if in a vacuum. The intentional absence of the usual mechanical noises is aimed at forging an atmosphere, which is both filmic and reminiscent of silent flashbacks or dreams. It alienates the observer by evoking an “elsewhere”, which paradoxically is clearly located in present. As with many of the works by Michael Sailstorfer, Hoher Besuch is in a state of indeterminacy. The sculpture exploits the elemental feeling of insecurity underpinning so many of life’s so-called significant events, and directs our focus at the flowing, permanent transition to which all things are irrevocably subject.

Thomas Schütte: Weinende Frau, 2011
Bronze, aeruginous, bricks

The bronze sculpture Weinende Frau is at the same time a fountain that was created for this site, rather the site with its brickwork was created for this relief. On a small knoll in a sheltered corner of the park, the visitor is confronted with the motif of a very private situation: weeping. We can think of this fountain figure — out of whose mouth water also streams — as a water dispenser and her abstract physiognomy as the theme of the cardinal humour of melancholy that the visitor encounters on his walk through the park.

Andreas Slominski: Der Parkplatz, 2007
Cobblestones, sand

Why are things as they are? This question leads us directly to Andreas Slominski’s Der Parkplatz. The economy of means that is evident here was already characteristic of earlier works by the artist, who has twice participated in the Venice Biennale. Now comes this cunningly simple Der Parkplatz, almost crazy, given the elaborate working process it involved. For the paving was first only laid round the edges, and was then completed by a workman lying under the car. But the absurdity of the relationship of his works – such as Tierfallen – to their titles, ultimately leads to the question, “What is art?” The same question as is posed – not without irony – by his installations and performances.

Mauro Staccioli: Untitled, 1999
Steel, painted

Mauro Staccioli has been working as a sculptor since 1968. His formal language can be described as Minimalist, but in contradistinction to Minimalism’s concentration on material and form, Staccioli includes the spatial context of his sculpture in the creative process as an aspect of his work that has equal validity. In consequence he has developed a working method which is mainly dependent on the site. For this reason his works have less of the stringency of Minimal Art’s objective investigation of the material. They incorporate a subjective interpretation of the spatial situation while retaining all Minimalism’s clarity of form.

Mark di Suvero: Racine du Naos, 1996
Steel, lacquered

While his wooden sculptures in the late 1950s were still influenced by constructivism, Mark di Suvero began from 1964 to make expressive, space-filling outdoor sculptures from steel joists and other steel components. In spite of the weight of their materiality, his works communicate a spatial dynamism in which Kinetic Art and Abstract Expressionism seem to merge. The works of Mark di Suvero are represented in the collections of the most important international museums, and with more than 100 large-scale sculptures in public spaces all over the world, his work, as no other, represents the face of Abstract Expressionist sculpture.

Rosemarie Trockel: L’Arc de Triomphe (Der armselige Baum/Die Zuwenignis), 2006
Two hanging Atlas-cedars (Cedrus atlantica Glauca pendula), aluminum

With her pictures, drawings and small sculptures, as well as with large sculptures and objects, installations and video works, which she puts together in exhibitions to form comprehensive conceptions the artist is pursuing strategies that cross the frontiers between mediums. Conflicting elements, such as (living) trees and a (dead) metal nose, Trockel integrates spatially and as a matter of content into a disturbing ensemble. The erotic connotations, allusions to the plight of the modern artist, the ironic, whimsical combination of sculpture and garden art – L’Arc de Triomphe goes far beyond levelling the threshold between nature and art.

Simon Ungers: Monolith, 1999
Plexiglass, steel, fluorescent tubes

Simon Ungers studied architecture at Cornell University from 1975 to 1980 in Ithaca, New York. He became known internationally as an architect when he built the T-House (in collaboration with Tom Kinslow), a private house with a sculptural feel made of Corten steel, and the Cube-House, made of concrete blocks. As an artist he specialised in Minimalist (light) installations and sculptures, which were built giving due consideration to the site. In 1995 he won the competition for the Holocaust Monument in Berlin (design remains unbuilt). Ungers was on the teaching staff at Harvard University, Cornell University and the University of Maryland. He lived and worked in New York and Cologne.

Bernar Venet: Four Arcs of 235,5°, 1999
Steel, painted

The central feature of the work of Bernar Venet, which covers many mediums, is dynamism. It governs his activities in all fields: painting, installation, design, concrete music, as well as theoretical writings, but above all it characterises his large-scale steel sculptures. The different programmatic groups of work shift between two diametrically opposed positions, one systematic, the other random. The element that provides structure is line (ligne terminée or ligne déterminée), which takes the form of a curved or bent band, rod or bar of steel. He took part in documenta in 1977 and in the Venice Biennale in 1978, and he achieved international recognition in the 1990s.

Bernard Voïta: Green Memories, 2011
Steel, varnished

Bernard Voïta has created a secret place in the park, already expressed in the title Green Memories. The sculpture itself does not tell of these memories; it is only highly charged with those from the artist’s mental world. The work is a miniature replica of a public pissoir as it exists in Paris. In its location near the boundary line to the busy traffic of the Riehler Strasse outside of the park, the ambivalence of an intimate place in the context of the romantic park grounds provides a contrast to public city space.

Paul Wallach: Ring-Around, 1999
White cement

Paul Wallach is largely known for small abstract sculptures made from fragile materials such as plaster, rusty metal or driftwood, which are never placed free-standing in open spaces, but against walls or in places rarely used to display works of art, such as the corners of rooms. The sculpture and its location creates an “interspace” – and together they form a coherent entity. This always creates a delicate mutual relationship, which the viewer is drawn into as a partner for further dialogue. In this way the basic Minimalism of the sculptures takes on a human dimension.

Lois Weinberger: Spur, 2015
Soil, plants

Lois Weinberger has an aisle drawn through the park. It crosses the stone-paved paths twice, cut through the lawn surface by a digger. The aisle ends in a heap of debris, the spoil of lawn, rubble and earth contrasting with the perfection of the park landscape. Weinberger’s aisle is cut and delicate groove, and at the same time a road for invasive plants. In his work, which reached a greater audience through a planting at Kassel main station during documenta 10, Weinberger deals with so-called ruderal species. Mostly referred to as weeds, they colonise fallow ground, cracks in the tarmac, heaps of rubble or undeveloped peripheries. In “well-kept” gardens they are normally weeded out. But Weinberger creates a hierarchical shift with a political purpose. He sees the ruderal plants as migrants, forced to survive under poor conditions. They suffer the same fate as people who lost their homes.

Martin Willing: Quadratschichtung, zweiachsig, wachsend, 1999/2000
titan, cut by water jet, welded, sandblasted

Martin Willing explores kinetic issues and oscillation processes in space with scientific precision ans systematics. In the process he makes sculptures from geometrically exact, shaped metal rods and strips (for preference in titanium, steel and duraluminum), which are pre-stressed against gravity. In this way they develop a special dynamic of the own somewhere between stasis and movement. The trained physicist cuts out of solid metal, and the closed form is in this way opened and made to oscillate. Monumental kinetic freestanding sculptures like Quadratschichtung, because of the complicated calculations and elaborate construction involved, form a limited position in his work.

Trevor Yeung: Two Reliers, 2020
Ginkgo biloba, streetlamp, cast iron, glass, LED grow light bulb

In Two Reliers by Trevor Yeung, a young ginkgo tree enters a close relationship with a small streetlamp fitted out with a pink LED light. The lamp serves as physical support for the little tree and also promotes its growth at night. Cultural progress has forced nature into a state of dependency on humankind. Yeung’s work can be read as critical commentary, but also as an intimate gesture of reconciliation between humans and nature.

Heimo Zobernig: Spartakus Catering, 1998/2001
Aluminum, concrete, beer tables, and beer benches

Heimo Zobernig belongs to a generation of artists who submit the meaningfulness of System Art to sceptical scrutiny on the formal, narrative and reception levels. His works are created in conjunction with and are dependent from their site. From a dedicated avoidance of content, a web of meaning that is both self-referential and open, with numerous cross-references, arises. The Austrian artist dissects and analyses phenomena with almost scientific precision, and presents their component parts, not without humour, in new constellations, e.g. at documenta 9 and 10 and at the Venice Biennale in 2001.