SILENT MOVIE

Axel Lieber

27 Oktober – 15 Dezember 2012

From October 27 to December 15, 2012, Hengesbach Gallery in Berlin presents the exhibition SILENT MOVIE by sculptor Axel Lieber. The show features works that construct a fictional parallel world, employing techniques from cartoons and animated film to sculpturally transform everyday objects. Axel Lieber’s exhibited works often assemble different temporal and spatial layers, creating hybrids from anthropomorphic traits of both childhood and adulthood.
You are warmly invited to the opening on October 26 at 6 PM.
A monograph titled THE LONG WAY HOME will be published in parallel with the exhibition, featuring a text by Dr. Stefanie Kreuzer (Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany), presenting Lieber’s work from the past 25 years and highlighting key characteristics of his oeuvre.
A pair of pants that swells from a child’s pant leg to the voluminous hip of a grown adult, a walking stick scaled down to child size, a sturdy chair compressed to the size of a kid’s chair—Axel Lieber cuts up his original motifs and reassembles the material elliptically. This method is comparable to the cutting of cinematic footage, enabling temporal leaps, flashbacks, flash-forwards, or irrationally combined episodes.
The sculptures are characterized by combining parts of two or more states without specifying the process of transformation. Instead, this process takes place fictionally in the viewer’s inner cinema, triggered by the omissions within the works.
In his oeuvre, Lieber’s montages can also refer to tactile, functional, or architectural contradictions, but in the solo exhibition SILENT MOVIE, they are focused on the temporal opposites of childhood and old age. The works reference cartoons not only by quoting narrative elements like speech bubbles, panels, and characters, but also by intensifying them with a comic-laconic edge—true to the original definition of a cartoon, they operate without spoken language.
Through the ironic juxtaposition of opposites such as childhood and adulthood, a certain melancholic drama arises that touches us in a peculiar way. Questions arise that address our inner selves—questions about identity, missed life opportunities, the containers of our fears and desires, and the search for purpose and meaning in life.
SILENT MOVIE, in its fictional framework, stands as a metaphor for a life journey—one that encompasses the search for meaning as well as feelings of emptiness and the pain of transience.

Installation Views