The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce an exhibition by Wilhelm Mundt. The exhibition, titled Areit ist das halbe Leben… (Worck is just half the life...) misspelled deliberately, presents a cross-section of the current production of the German sculptor.
In his extensive body of work, Wilhelm Mundt (b. 1959, Grevenbroich) deals with distinctly sculptural themes that negotiate some of the most pressing issues of our times. In his best-known group of works – the elegant biomorphic sculptures named Trashstones – form is determined by their content.
The sculptures’ interiors consist of studio waste, which the artist artfully wraps in coloured polyester, aluminium or bronze. Thus, the end form of each Trashstone only hints at its interior content; the wrapped up waste and trash remain visible only in their determination of the final form, the works in themselves containing more in their biomorphic beauty than the eye can see. Essential components of the work – the form-giving interior, its material as well as their metaphorical content – remain hidden from view. The discrepancy between the visible, the shiny, colourful and softly modulated outer form and their interior lends these sculptures their daunting quality.
With their immediate sensual form, combining aesthetics and ethics, irony and seriousness, the sculptures, formally reminiscent of erratic boulders, address the problem of sustainability. The Trashstones can thus be read as a cryptic commentary on one of the most pressing ecological issues of today – whilst also constituting a radical development of abstract sculpture the inspiration for which can be traced to artists such as Hans Arp and Barbara Hepworth.
Since their first appearance in 1989, individual Trashstones have been numbered in three digits, with the total number of works in the series having grown to almost 800. Each Trashstone is thus embedded in a continuous series – a procedure reminiscent of serial and industrial production processes – but nonetheless, they retain a uniqueness in shape and colour.
Some of the current works in the exhibition explore, through a painterly line on the surface of the sculpture, another dimension: that is, the border between painting and sculpture. The soft form of the plastic stone is circumscribed by an endless line embedded in the surface. Like a ball of wool, a line wraps itself around the stone, invoking the question of its beginning and end. The form is also complicated by this “inscription” on the surface, which is most evident in the largest work in this exhibition, weighing a considerable 1.3 tons. This white stone is inscribed with a circular marking, the painterly-looking ductus of which is also conditioned by its production process. Once again, the artist plays with the viewer’s perception.
Another new work, a large green Trashstone enclosed in a green prison-like cage, creates a room within a room and breaks through one’s view of the object, framing the sculpture anew.
Wilhelm Mundt’s work has been shown amongst others at the Fondation Villa Datris, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Fondation Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf and K20 Grabbeplatz, Dusseldorf. His works are in the collections of several museums and institutions, including Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Margulies Collection Miami, Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, University of Bayreuth, MunichRE, BNP Paribas and Vestas Aarhus.
