Axel Lieber
October 19 – December 4, 2015
Autumn has arrived in the gallery, bringing with it something warm around the head—hooded sweatshirts in fashionable colors, the matching shoes, and to pack everything up, the environmentally friendly paper shopping bag. But isn’t this protection against the cold deceptive? After all, the sweatshirt consists only of seams, forming a mere framework that exposes our heart to the cold and the spirits of gloomy November days. Even the pristine white shopping bag resists, staring back at us with large dark eyes.
Where should we turn when we want to orient ourselves in the world, feel its vastness, and find a distant place? We study a map, only to find ourselves immediately in the vast, dark universe. What originally began as curiosity or orientation or longing now becomes a view of the cosmos—the distant and seemingly unchangeable. Axel Lieber has created this cosmos with great care, piece by piece, through painterly blackenings and calls it “the private universe.”
The cosmos, as the all-encompassing, is made of delicate paper. Like in a children’s book, one can still see the folds where something opens up for us to marvel at. Images and words combine to form what we construct our world from. Images alone are not enough—words must be added as orientation, to give the visual whole its direction. But since words need an anchor in the images and cannot float freely through the cosmos of imagery, they are framed. These speech bubbles accumulate in our lives because we need so many orientations and classifications. If we piece them together individually, they form a forest of words, a thicket from which Axel Lieber has freed the words again, leaving only the bubbles with their directional cues behind.
We have now passed through the works displayed in the first room. Lieber’s current exhibition performs a re-polarization of images, detaching our perception from familiar contexts and reinterpreting their semantic content. Lieber’s approach is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, where an entirely new world opens behind each possible door. With Lieber, however, no door is even needed—this re-polarization happens directly within the everyday world. Axel Lieber has titled his exhibition “Predetermined Breaking Points.” A predetermined breaking point is an element of a construction that, in the event of damage, absorbs the destructive forces to keep the impact on the overall structure as minimal as possible.
How many such breaking points exist in our lives, and where are they located? Is simply identifying them already a healing act? Or should we instead pursue the more interesting question: where do these breaking points lead us, and what new perspectives emerge from them?
The handling of expectations in images and the re-polarization of images is actually the task of painters. However, in the realm of three-dimensional work, the creation of sculptures, there is also the classical concept of the sculptor. Axel Lieber does full justice to this concept. However, he is not a sculptor who starts with the raw state of material. In our complex contemporary world, he starts from certain initial situations, from given images, from existing orientations. He questions these orientations, reflects on them, and reverses them. In doing so, he takes inspiration from childlike imagination, in which the re-polarization of ideas is much more flexible than in the world of adults. He subverts the urge for a fixed, stable interpretation of the world typical of adult life, instead liquefying our rigidities, our clinging to factuality, setting them free and opening them to the realm of the fictional, the possible, the spiritual—without, however, drifting away from our down-to-earth everyday life. The fictional is not a distant or exalted ideal realm, but a direct extension of our realities—only that these no longer stand securely in the world, but open the view to something beyond, with a wink, into the artfully delicate realm of humor.
Installation Views
