Claudia Wieser
Furniture

In Furniture, Berlin-based artist Claudia Wieser (°1973, Freilassing, Germany) presents an ensemble of drawings, ceramic and wooden sculptures, and a spatial intervention where the walls of the cabinet rooms are covered with black-and-white prints of interiors, creating an illusionistic perspective.

Wieser’s visual style is marked by an abstraction that is precise and consistent in its use of form, colour and materials. Like abstract paintings, Wieser’s glazed ceramic tiles consist of geometric patterns. In one case, these are combined to form a large sculpture that is placed in the hemicycle room like a free-standing folding screen. Surrounding the screen are wooden sculptures that are made up of elementary shapes like cylinders, cones and spheres. There is a thematic and pictorial resonance between the spatial interventions and the series of framed drawings and photographs overlaid with geometric compositions in gold leaf and pencil.

These pure studies in form and colour are indebted to abstract and modern art, and to the early twentieth-century Bauhaus legacy in particular. Mirroring the teaching methods of this school, Wieser employs craftsmanship and a subjective palette in her attempt to attain an autonomous pictorial aesthetics in which functionality, art and spirituality are tightly interwoven. Her artistic research draws from an extensive archive of universal, stylistic elements from art history. It appropriates the formal rules of early modernist artworks and questions their objectivity, realism and functionality.

This method and the title of the exhibition also point us to the central concern of Wieser’s current work: what is the status of sculptures that have been designed as objects? Wieser’s oeuvre is developed in response to this question and it explores the boundaries between pure and applied forms of art. Employing different techniques and approaching her materials in a personal, tactile manner, Wieser succeeds in endowing each of her sculptures with a distinct character. With her studies of light and shadow, tone and texture, and immaterial effects, the artist focuses on the autonomous, spiritual power of expression that marks an abstract modernist style. Wieser intensifies the primary relations between material, form and concept in order to bring out the inner nature of the work of art, and to bring into focus the pure appearance of the image itself.

The defined space between the distinct objects creates a transcendental ‘atmosphere’ and puts the exhibition as a whole into perspective. In this light, a thorough study of KIOSK’s architectural spaces was conducted and by means of mural tableaus, these spaces are appropriated as a necessary extension of the sculptural space. In this ‘total work of art’ the primary experience of space is put first. The visitor sets out on a promenade architecturale organized on a balanced rhythm of distorted views, interacting forms, tactile media and atmospheric colours.

exhibition text / press release / poster