Sibylle Waldhausen – Menschen und Räume
17.11.2012 – 30.03.2013
back to overviewSchach! Herausfordernd und selbstbewusst stellt sie sich ihm entgegen. Er ist perplex. Sie scheint ihn überrascht zu haben und spielt genüsslich ihre Karte aus. Das ausgestellte Becken, die rausgestreckte Brust – alles deutet auf ihre lässig demonstrierte Überlegenheit und auch wenn man ihre Gesichtszüge nicht erkennen kann, so spürt man förmlich, mit welcher Kampfeslust sie ihn mustert. Er ist ihr zugewandt, überlegt, was er tun kann, das Fragezeichen steht ihm ins Gesicht geschrieben. Er scheint zwischen Fassungslosigkeit und Schicksalsergebenheit hin und her zu schwanken. Sie macht einen Schritt auf ihn zu, er kann nicht ausweichen. Kann er sich retten?
Sibylle Waldhausen ist eine scharfsinnige Beobachterin. In ihrer ersten Einzelausstellung in der Stern-Wywiol Galerie zeigt uns die Berliner Künstlerin (geb. 1963) die Veränderungen und Herausforderungen der globalisierten und digitalisierten Welt auf, indem Sie uns den damit einhergehenden Werte- und Rollenwandel bewusst werden lässt. Sibylle Waldhausen hat die Fähigkeit, Dinge auf den Punkt zu bringen und eindringliche Bilder für abstrakte Begriffe zu finden. Der medialen Welt begegnet sie dabei mit einem uralten Material – Bronze – und traditioneller plastischer Handarbeit.
Speech at the vernissage of the exhibition "Menschen und Räume" Sibylle Waldhausen by Dr Kathrin Reeckmann, 16.11.2012
Hamburg's main railway station, only a three-minute walk from our gallery, is a world on a small scale. This is where everyone's paths cross:
The paths of the hurried and the slow, the explorers and the aimless, the late-comers and the waiting, the travellers and the stranded. Added to this is the sound of the big city made up of voices, the sound of engines and horns, the sound of classical music and sometimes street music.
The taxi rank between the station and the Schauspielhaus is an island of peace and order. The cars are lined up neatly, the drivers read or stand together in conversation. And quite often you can see some of them playing chess:
- A rubbish bin serves as a table, on it a folding board, a red sandwich tin (it is always red) serves as a container for the pieces.
- Men around it in concentrated relaxation, younger and older ones
Amidst the anonymous scenery of the station, the chess players give an image of intimacy and culture that I always look forward to.
It is chess as an ancient, sophisticated cultural technique, analogue and connecting.
It is chess as an image of those who play it, as an image of human society: the roles are distributed, can also be changed sometimes, everything is connected to everything else: the strong and the weak, attack and defence.
The chessboard is a fixed space in which the pieces move.
The position in which the chess pieces stand says something about their possibilities for action, about their function in the whole.
The chessboard with its pieces appears as a metaphor for our society.
And this is also the theme of the sculptor S. Waldhausen:
Like an ethnologist, she explores the behaviour of the human species, is interested in patterns of action and hierarchies, analyses attitudes and structures.
The chess game and the many other works on the subject of chess that you see here are only one facet of approaching this subject.
SW does not need a lot of personnel to explore the diversity and abysses of human existence: A man, a woman, at most a crown as a prop. She works solely with proportions, body language and surface as means of representation.
For example:
- The queen who keeps her composure despite all hostility.
- The biblical governor Pilate, who clings to his high throne and makes himself small with his knowingly wrong decision.
- Or the "guy with a dog" who wants to conceal his own insecurity through the aggressive animal.
- Or the "awkward couple" who have yet to find their way to each other with their lust.
SW is an artist who uses the classical medium of sculpture to take up very topical themes.
She is interested in the new distribution of roles between men and women, questions hierarchies, addresses feelings such as loneliness, lostness, power, powerlessness, examines groups and their inherent dynamics.
Her working method is classical: she forms her figures in wax or plaster, applies layer after layer and works the surface with fingers and tools. Her sculptures are delicate and slender, the surface is a fine-nerved, moving relief. SW is thus in the tradition of classical modernism, in the tradition of Auguste Rodin, who painted with his hands, and Alberto Giacometti, who sought a form for being human in itself and for the integration of sculpture/man into space.
Waldhausen's figures are also classical in the sense that they are naked. Their nakedness is so self-evident that one hardly registers it. The great, the real subject of sculpture, the human body, is what interests SW. In this, they are entirely determined by their posture. SW knows how to capture man's relationship to the world in a gesture, in a posture, can capture entire stories, be they dramas or kömödien, in a single image.
SW moved from the human figure and its foundation, the pedestal, to the subject of the house a few years ago and has since then continued to deal with man's built environment.
By conceiving of the city as a sculptural form, it becomes a medium in which current themes such as the permanent compulsion to change, the increasing speed of life or the isolation of modern man can be artistically translated.
I would like to draw your attention to the work "Tetris", named after the famous computer game, where geometric shapes fall from above and have to be arranged into an orderly whole by the player in a matter of seconds. In SW's work, abstract house cubes are piled up and into each other seemingly without any inner order, leaving only a narrow gap for the little church that half-anxiously half-confidently pushes its way in.
Or the concrete houses, built in the classical application technique, covered with gold leaf on the inside. They show the dwelling of man as a protective shell, repellent and anonymous on the outside, mystically radiant on the inside and at the same time standing on shaky ground, half in a dance, half in an earthquake.
Ladies and gentlemen, SW is an artist with very special skills. She finds vivid images for our emotional states, hopes and fears. She reflects on the relationship between being and appearances, questions our certainties and holds up a mirror to us - one of the most difficult and exciting qualities of art. And she demonstrates humour in her works, very subtly and sometimes hidden. But I don't have to explain that to you, you will discover it for yourself.
Thank you for listening and I wish you a stimulating evening.