English
Deutsch
until 29.01. | #3232ARTatBerlin | Taubert Contemporary presents from 5th November 2021 the exhibition “parts” by the artist Albert Weis.
Albert Weis (*1969 in Passau, lives and works in Berlin) has given his first solo exhibition at Taubert Contemporary the enigmatic title parts. As if parts were joining together to form a whole here. But as one walks through the space, it quickly becomes clear that Weis, while developing the various works with minimalist precision and conceptual clarity, has deliberately kept them in a state of provisionality.
Already from the side walk, visitors recognize the glow of a monumental polyhedron (parts, 2021), with which the artist alludes to a symbol of modernism, Albrecht Dürer’s copperplate engraving Melencolia I from 1514. There, a rhombohedron represents the preciousness of geometry because its shape is predictable but not regular. Weis uses this idea like an instruction manual, first unfolding the shape and then folding it back together to form a new object. Thus, the parts can be recombined, but do they make sense? In Dürer’s case, the answer lies in the variety of signs he gathers in his famous engraving, the hourglass, the sleeping dog, the ladder to heaven, and more. They all develop a meaning, but they never come together in a consistent narrative. Therein lay the immense modernity of Melencolia, in its revolutionary recognition of a world made up only of parts. In the works in the exhibitions, these parts appear as grandiose splinters of modernism, for example in the form of the Modulor system of measurement, which the architect Le Corbusier based his buildings on from the mid-1940s and which Albert Weis applies to his perforated sheet foldings.
Lochblech, 2017, powder-coated and perforated sheets, dimensions variable
Thus, in Weis’ work, it is precisely the small movements that unhinge the world, as in the towering work revolution, which consists of two identical, brightly polished aluminum panels. They stand slightly tilted against the wall, one at an angle of 5°, the other at an angle of 14°. This difference is enough to open up completely different perspectives on the limited space and its viewers. In its reflection, the existing becomes recognizable.
Such a mechanism also applies to the site-specific wall works made of aluminum tape (silver). For this, Weis folds a sheet of paper the size of the wall into a geometrically shaped layering, which he generously fixes to the wall with the tape. The soft aluminum tape nestles into all the recesses of the wall’s surface, refracting the incoming daylight at every slight irregularity while maintaining its metallic smoothness over the folded paper.
parts (white), 2021, aluminium, neon, transformer, 56 x 48 x 51 cm
It is no coincidence that in the parts exhibition one feels reminded of the discussions about the qualities of the exhibition space as such, especially Georges Bataille’s celebration of the museum as a “giant mirror[s] in which man finally looks at himself from all sides.” (1929) In contrast, since the 1970s there has been a conception of the museum as a forum for social processes, as a contact zone. The special quality of Albert Weis’ works is that he reconciles both ideas with his concept of parts that do not add up to a whole.
– Markus Heinzelmann
Vernissage: Friday, 5th of November 2021, 6:00 – 9:00 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 5th of November 2021 – Saturday, 29th of January 2022
to the gallery
Image caption: Detail: parts, 2021
Exhibition Albert Weis – Taubert Contemporary | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
