We are delighted to present Stefan Wissel in his second solo exhibition with the gallery.
Elegant, unmistakably precise and humorous, Stefan Wissel presents new works at VAN HORN that tell of Darth Vader’s mask, Mayan pyramids and the serial dehierarchization of genius. The exhibition shows pictures made of closable awnings, a stovepipe with a typographic appearance, or seemingly purely objective-rational sculptures of a strict formalism that lay poetically subjective tracks beneath their surface. In “Portrait of a Plan”, Stefan Wissel provides insights into his most recent coordinate system of transformed parameters of what already exists and its rearrangements.
A frosted glass slowly rotates in front of the dot grid of a microwave. Set in motion, the white surface of the milk produces poetic images reminiscent of Op art or Zero. At the same time, the milk glass becomes the main protagonist of an ironic treatise on life itself – until the journey on the turntable ends in the black nothingness of the household appliance. From the black nothing, Wissel’s plan leads to the dark side of power. In Darth Vader’s Chichén Itzá Experience, the artist challenges the substructure of his school desk to a sculptural re-enactment and produces a sculpture that, instead of retaliating aesthetically, enters into alliances with its supposedly objective new regulation.
A highlight of the exhibition are the large-format canvases clad in precisely fitting sheaths of awning fabrics, the surfaces of which have reclosable swings of line. Stefan Wissel, who is known for his object-based individual works, presents with the group of works “Große Klappe” hybrid wall works, which only reveal their entire intention in the moment of seriality. Here Wissel dedicates himself to the curved line as the origin of an artistic idea and heroic gesture of the ingenious artist. Instead of using it, Wissel ironically breaks with the pathetic flash of inspiration in art and turns it into a functional zipper in series.The exhibition “Portrait of a Plan” shows Stefan Wissel’s playfully unpretentious handling of the palette of artistic strategies and their media and invites us to invent what is missing in his ping pong with our collective memory and his art.
Text: Victoria Tarak