{"id":24092,"date":"2007-07-13T11:27:08","date_gmt":"2007-07-13T09:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/?p=24092"},"modified":"2022-03-18T14:34:46","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T13:34:46","slug":"slurp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/slurp\/","title":{"rendered":"Slurp"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slurp<\/h2>
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GEREON KREBBER<\/h5>\n<\/div><\/div>

13.07.2007 \u2013 28.10.2007<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Gereon Krebber, Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J. Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>
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Slurp<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Even from a distance, passers-by feel themselves drawn to the strangely amorphous form in <\/span>front of the Foundation DKM gallery in Duisburg\u2019s Inner Harbor: a kind of oversized fruit <\/span>with an orange-brown peel. Particularly striking is the coloring of that \u00abpeel\u00bb: the tinted <\/span>plaster glows optimistically in the fresh orange of a playground jungle gym; on a second look, <\/span>that glow seems melancholically faded, an earth-colored umber of rusting metal. Its form <\/span>evokes similarly contradictory ideas. Despite appearing strangely familiar and close to <\/span>everyday life on the one hand (evoking, for example, spontaneous associations with an <\/span>oversized piece of fruit lying on its back), it also presents strangely and abstractly as a <\/span>theoretically-developed complex, reminiscent not by chance of freestyle concrete sculptures <\/span>(<\/span>a type still seen in front of public buildings in Germany, for example). While it certainly <\/span>piques a desire to touch it, climb on it or rock it back and forth, that instinct is suppressed by <\/span>the usual impulse to keep a certain distance from artwork. This first \u00abthing\u00bb is answered by its <\/span>counterpart behind the glass windows in the exhibition space, a space that recalls a showroom <\/span>from the outside. Both sculptures correspond to one other as formal counterparts, in effect <\/span>forming a unity. Both show something like the grayish sides of a fruit slice, facing one other. <\/span>Reading them representationally, one might ask:<\/span> Has a knife somehow cut this monumental <\/span>fruit plant, tuber, lump of dough, marzipan roll, loaf of bread, piece of meat, sausage tip, <\/span>possibly beef tongue into two different sections, the larger one outside, the smaller one <\/span>inside? The suggestion of thingness is so strong that the visitor almost wonders which <\/span>invisible hand placed the smaller section in the gallery space.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

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Gereon Krebber has thus realized a two-part sculpture, one whose ambivalence both reacts to and elaborates contrary sculptural possibilities. On the one hand, it unfolds as a sculptural <\/span>occurrence in the tradition of concrete, constructive sculpture: developed out of itself, <\/span>following its own principles of order, autonomous, significant, and sufficient unto itself. <\/span>And <\/span>yet the pair of sculptures have neither concretion nor meditation in mind. What seems to <\/span>fascinate Krebber is their true function: playful appeal. It becomes clear that that the volume <\/span>and surface of these objects are not a choice stemming from any particular material or spatial <\/span>reference; their unique, almost emotional impact owes to their extreme thing-like quality \u2014\u00a0 <\/span>arriving at something approaching a Claes Oldenburg figuration. <\/span>Slurp<\/span><\/em>, the exhibition title, <\/span>certainly hints at a relaxed relationship to the comic generation\u2019s legacy, particularly its <\/span>approach the iconic and emotional qualities of Pop Art. Onomatopoeic and associative, <\/span>Slurp<\/em> <\/span>(as in the noisy slurping sound) conjures <\/span>a scene from the world of illustrated picture books <\/span>and immediately eludes linguistic appropriation. Yet the two divided \u00abslices\u00bb derive their <\/span>charm not from Oldenburg\u2019s practice of transforming banal everyday objects into ironic <\/span>monuments to consumer society, but rather from their light-hearted play with the power of our <\/span>imagination. Krebber is however a great-grandson of both dominant American artistic <\/span>movements of the 1960s: Pop Art and its counterpart Minimal Art, the former understood as a <\/span>delayed affirmation of consumption and everyday life, the latter as a reaction to loss of the <\/span>concrete as a result of mass media.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Something similar can be said of the green pattern on the wall, a cluster of circles dense in <\/span>some places and scattered in others. The pattern has the look of afterimages, yet a viewer <\/span>upon approaching also becomes aware of countless green and (almost invisible) white paper <\/span>dots \u2014 each individually glued by hand to the wall. The circles, intertwined like a kind of mist, <\/span>replicate and magnify the hundreds of thousands of microbe-like,\u00a0 elementary shapes. Despite <\/span>the diffuse structure, it gives the wall a slightly sign-like appearance, making it seem almost <\/span>readable. Both the sculpture and the wall pattern are suspended in the tension between <\/span>succinct visual and ephemeral thingness. Still, as soon as the lured passer-by notices them \u2014 <\/span>freed, if only for a moment, of the belief that forms come only from rational\u00a0 planning and artistic calculation \u2014 <\/span>their emotion and spontaneity are rewarded.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Michael Krajewski<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Translation: Amy Patton<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GEREON KREBBER (DE)
\n13.07.2007 \u2013 28.10.2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":22336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,31,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exh-archive-gdkm","category-exhibition","category-pk-gk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24092"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33865,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24092\/revisions\/33865"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}