Tobias Putrih "When Language Goes on Holiday"
Meulensteen
This event has ended.
Meulensteen presents When Language Goes on Holiday, an exhibition of new work by Tobias Putrih. Rooted in the ideals of high modernism, Putrih's intricate structures conjure notions of the sublime but infuse them with a gentle humor. Building on his interdisciplinary background, Putrih pulls from a range of fields—from architecture and structural engineering to social theory.
When Language Goes on Holiday includes two significant works by the artist, Apartment and Patio(Solaris), which combine simple modular elements to create complex, organic structures. In both pieces, sets of related forms function as building blocks for quasi-functional spaces. For Apartment, Putrih designed a new system of black aluminum panels that connect to one another according to a basic hexagonal grid. They are arranged to form walls, partitions, ceiling sections, furniture elements, and abstract objects. The open-ended system allows for disassembly and reconfiguration, enabling Putrih to fill the gallery in a non-hierarchical manner.
Putrih cites the hexagonal grid of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House as well as the architecture and sculpture of Tony Smith as points of departure for his new work, noting the significance of “play with abstract forms, geometry, and modularity” in both of their practices—play in perhaps its most child-like sense. Smith is known to have developed studies for his sculptures by combining paper models of basic polyhedra, often with the assistance of his children. And Wright, Smith’s early mentor, often described Froebel’s Gifts, a famous series of German pedagogical toys that he played with as a child, as a major influence on his design ethos. These specific toys have also made appearances in some of Putrih’s earlier work.
In drawing from Smith and Wright as precedents, Putrih looks less to their finished forms than to the systems within which their play was possible. Putrih has always characterized his own work as anti-object; he typically uses accessible household materials—from cardboard and plywood to plastic twist-ties—to position his pieces as provisional studies. In Apartment, the material is a refined powder-coated black aluminum, but he maintains the provisional spirit with a kit of parts that emphasizes the potential of permutations over the authority of a complete, autonomous object.
Also on view will be Patio(Solaris), which makes use of a system of cardboard tubes and curved plywood connectors that the artist originally devised for a previous work, Solaris(2009). The earlier installation functioned as a small auditorium for screening Deimantas Narkevicius's 2007 film Revisiting Solaris, a reinterpretation of Andrei Tarkovski's seminal 1978 film. For the work’s current iteration at Meulensteen, the system is used to create four distinct sculptural objects.
Media
Schedule
from May 05, 2011 to June 25, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-05-05 from 17:00 to 20:00