with works from  Anna-Maria Kursawe, Jean Baptiste Monnin, Alexandra Schlund & Elgin Willigerodt
Michael Kruscha - Künstlerischer Leiter

In dialog with the architectural framing of the Rathaus-Galerie, eight artistic positions are shown that focus on different concepts of space. The unifying element of the exhibited works is architecture, either as a defining element of urban space, as the basis for constructive compositions or as an expression of social and political conditions.

Juliane Duda
Anna-Maria Kursawe
Jean-Baptiste Monnin
Thomas Ravens
Alexandra Schlund
Antje Taubert
Benedikt Terwiel
Elgin Willigerodt

Elgin Willigerodt lives and works as an artist in Berlin. Her sculptures are delicate,
abstract and have the human being as their scale. For her, the concentration on pure
form is also an ordering of thoughts, or even better: a limiting, condensing of the
diffuse, drifting and unsorted.
In her installation Wächter (Sentinel), she overlays the narrative night-time perspective
of the Zoological Garden with brightly colored sculptures made of metal, Plexiglas and
glossy painted kappa board. The ´Wächter´ enter into a dialog with the surrounding
light reflections and function as abstract hybrid beings that lead us unquestioningly
into other worlds.

www.atrans.org | www.elgin-willigerodt.de
www.facebook.com/atransorg | www.facebook.com/elginwilligerodt
www.instagram.com/atrans/ | www.instagram.com/elginw

“The line does not imitate the visible, but makes visible.” (Paul Klee)
 
Concentration on pure form is always also an ordering of thoughts, better still: limiting, condensing the diffuse, drifting, unsorted. The art of the simply concrete is therefore less the creation of order than the exclusion of disturbance, not an escape from the world, but the design of a shaped, creative world - even in the smallest detail.
Everything concrete can be read as a seismograph to test the acceptance of reduced attitudes calibrated to the form and function of reason or to recognize their value for a purposefully designed world. Perhaps our willingness to understand the non-narrative as a yardstick and an appeal for self-examination is a much more important topic than all the judgments and conflicting opinions that otherwise determine everyday life.

Both artists, Ines Doleschal and Elgin Willigerodt, work with pure abstract geometric elements, with means from which architecture is created. Pure perspective spatial structure, once painted or collaged, once built; lines that organize the space, that become surfaces and spatial bodies that in turn break up.

Inspired by existing modern architecture, Ines Doleschal invents her own complex “spatial images”, while Elgin Willigerodt conducts basic research on the subject of space with “prototypes”.

For Ines Doleschal, who trained in London, Münster and Berlin, the interior design of Bauhaus architecture is the starting point and reference for her own spatial compositions on paper. In her series Homage to HS, she explores the projects of the mural painting workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau. Freely invented architectural forms show partly surprising color compositions, which were created based on the color plans of the workshop of the master Hinnerk Scheper (“HS”) and her own view of the Bauhaus interiors in Dessau. In the series Collages miniatures, for which she combines painted paper and her architectural photographs to create small inlays, the colors are also unusually differentiated, the spatial structures are above all carriers of an intense and sensitive chromaticism. Even in the large format on canvas, she sets surface against space and creates a suction effect in perspectival alignments that is characterized by colourful contrasts.

In Elgin Willigerodt's sculptural works, the line becomes the central theme, the line as a boundary and structuring element in space. Freedom requires limitation, limitation requires freedom.

The ancient Greeks saw figures in the many shining stars in the night sky, drawing imaginary lines between the individual points and thus projecting their entire mythological world onto the sky in the form of constellations. Is there a spatial representation of a constellation, and what would such a model look like?

Elgin Willigerodt creates filigree constructions from colorfully painted wooden or iron slats, which at first glance display a clear geometry that can be quickly grasped by the eye and mind, a kind of three-dimensional cell. At second glance, the forms come to life, not only visually, due to their strong colors and asymmetry, and appear to be in motion. Seemingly static sculptures such as Ragtime (2013), on the other hand, are so “hand-friendly” and elastically constructed that they are led from a (still) state into movement during musical and dance interactions (documented in the film “Alternate Exterior Angles of Constant Departure” by Lucia Gerhardt, sculptures: Elgin Willigerodt).

The otherwise mostly angular angles and straight lines give way in the sculpture “Poppy Spots” to a flowing, round line describing shapes, into which circles of transparent colored acrylic glass are inserted.