Manfred Pernice, sculpturama, Secession 2010, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
Berlin-based German artist Manfred Pernice developed the sculpturama show especially for the Hauptraum at the Secession. His sculptural works are built or assembled out of simple, sometime painted or sprayed materials including cardboard, chipboard, concrete, and metal, supplemented with text, maps or photographs. Starting from his observations of the urban environment, he highlights its failings and subjects the ordering system of modernity to a fundamental critique. His works set up an interplay between autonomous form and an installation-based, narrative and site-specific character. They deal with good and bad form, with perfection and imprecision, realism and abstraction.
Manfred Pernice, sculpturama, Secession 2010, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
The exhibition title, sculpturama, alludes on the one hand to the panorama-like, near symmetrical layout that articulates the space with lines of sight and interrelation. Immediately in front of the entrance, Pernice positions an architectural sculpture whose form recalls the basic structure of a road bridge. It offers viewers two opportunities for an outlook and overview: at the end of the underpass, through which visitors are channelled, and on the platform above accessed via a hidden staircase at the side.
Manfred Pernice, sculpturama, Secession 2010, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
On the other hand, the title of Pernice’s exhibition refers directly to the theme: the possibilities (and history) of sculpture. Its fundamental properties – proportions, surface structures, material qualities, the relation of volumes to one another, but especially the relationship between sculpture and viewer and the related habits of reception – are dealt with and displayed as in a theme park. The question of physicality and its perception, for example, is illustrated in exemplary form by the two sculptures in the middle of the space, Kaffee u. Kuchen and o. T.. Because they slowly rotate, viewers no longer need to walk round the object in order to see it from all sides. The fact that they likely do so in spite of the growing media power of two-dimensional images is due to an old habit. Becoming aware of this seemingly paradoxical situation leads to the surprise of something that is actually well known: sculpture is three-dimensional!
Manfred Pernice, sculpturama, Secession 2010, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
Manfred Pernice (born 1963 in Hildesheim) studied at the art academies in Braunschweig and Berlin.
Selected solo shows: 2010: baldt1, Modern Art Oxford; Tutti, Kunstverein Salzburg; 2008: Que-Sah, Neues Museum, Nuremberg; 2007: Haldensleben..., Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Selected group shows: 2010: Sao Paulo Biennale; 2008: Life on Mars. 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; 2007: Unmonumental: The Object of the 21st Century, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Y.E.S. (Ü), Skulptur Projekte Münster; 2003: Die Erfindung der Vergangenheit, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; 2002: documenta 11, Kassel.
Manfred Pernice lives and works in Berlin.
Manfred Pernice, sculpturama, Secession 2010, Photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
CATALOGUE
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MANFRED PERNICE sculpturama 196 pages, dimension: 31x23 cm Texts: Verena Dengler, Klaus Gölz, Axel Jablonski, Bettina Klein, András Pálffy, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Hemma Schmutz, Annette Südbeck, German/English Secession 2010, ISBN 978-3-902592-41-5 Vertrieb: Revolver Verlag ___________________ available in the shop |
Manfred Pernice, 2010
ARTIST TALK
Manfred Pernice with Roland Kollnitz
Thursday, December 2, 2010, 7.00 p.m.
An Event by the Friends of the Secession
The Secession is supported by:
Erste Bank – Partner of the Secession
Wien Kultur
Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur
Friends of the Secession
Cooperation-, Mediapartners, Non-Cash Benefit:
Der Standard
Ö1 Club
Silver Server
Trumer Privatbrauerei
| TREVOR PAGLEN MARIA BUSSMANN | EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2010 |
For further information and photographic material please contact:
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at