{"id":24119,"date":"2004-01-26T13:29:12","date_gmt":"2004-01-26T12:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/?p=24119"},"modified":"2022-03-07T15:22:12","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T14:22:12","slug":"flying-catacombs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/flying-catacombs\/","title":{"rendered":"Flying Catacombs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flying Catacombs<\/h2>
<\/div>
THOMAS VIRNICH<\/h5>\n<\/div><\/div>

26.01.2004 \u2013 30.04.2004<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Flying<\/div>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/section>
<\/div><\/div>

Flying Catacombs <\/em><\/span><\/strong>\u00a0_ <\/span>Thomas Virnich<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

With these sculptures, Thomas Virnich has fulfilled a dream. Drifting between clouds and<\/span>roots, between temples or pyramids and space stations,\u00a0 which is to say between above and <\/span>below, yesterday and tomorrow, are large sections of the two houses and garden where the <\/span>sculptor works and lives with his family in M\u00f6nchengladbach. The artist had long pondered <\/span>the idea of taking a closer look at his home – buildings of an old school from the nineteenth <\/span>century – from a greater height. Though familiar with every corner, the spatial order of his <\/span>own little world, viewed from above, became a tableau for unexpected discoveries and <\/span>sculptural fantasies. The <\/span>Fliegenden Katakomben<\/span> (<\/span>Flying Catacombs)<\/span><\/em> affirm the artist\u2019s own <\/span>summary of his artistic approach: \u201cI work biographically.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

<\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/a>
Exhibition view Gallery DKM<\/div>
Photo: Werner J Hannappel<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/div><\/div>
<\/div><\/div>

Virnich\u2019s artistic tackling of a familiar domestic situation called for a fair amount of optimism and perseverance on his part, along with the transport of comprehensive quantities of <\/span>cardboard, wood, glue and paints, light bulbs, broomsticks, sheet zinc, and so on. Prior to this, <\/span>he had felt his way into the task by creating small, more manageable variants. Before <\/span>committing to their risky execution on a 1:10 scale – his largest sculptural work to date – he <\/span>decided to reproduce the buildings accurately and in their entirety, down to the last detail, as a <\/span>model maker would. Later came the courtyard with all its corners, trees with found objects <\/span>and sculptures placed between them, street lamps and light from the street lamps, the sky <\/span>
above, and finally the hidden spaces and objects under the roofs and in the ground, along with <\/span>the memories and assumptions that are associated with everything: a universe full of <\/span>entangled materials and ideas, a merging of reality and fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Overhead observations had already repeatedly provided the sculptor with the necessary creative entr\u00e9e, spurring a rivalry with reality. For example, in his rendering of the Earth a <\/span>few years ago.<\/span> In recreating its surface, the artist had to wonder whether the usual geography <\/span>of the globe clings to a model representation that interprets our complex, very different views <\/span>of the world in a one-sided and static way? The Earth, as we know, is changeable. The <\/span>question prompted the sculptor to come up with alternatives, which is why he varied the usual <\/span>distribution order of land and sea. Virnich made the world dissectable, enabling us to pull out <\/span>its various components and examine how they relate to one other beneath the surface. Any <\/span>change to an individual component affects the whole. Because Earth-related entropy triggers <\/span>emotions, every change to the sculpture becomes an incalculable game, one that makes it <\/span>difficult to predict the state of the world. With it, Virnich\u2019s sculpture of the Earth becomes <\/span>deceptively real.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The large, unsupported chunks of sculpture were created effortlessly and without a plan, left <\/span>solely to the logic of the hand, the game, sensations and any bit of spontaneous inspiration. <\/span>Virnich takes possession of reality and uses it as malleable matter; he follows the <\/span>consequences of that choice wherever it takes him. His sculptural approach is characterized <\/span>by spurts of euphoric exertion and action, nervousness and self-doubt. Even the remove of a <\/span>few minutes could trigger spur-of-the-moment, creative decision-making on his part. <\/span>Dramatic interventions and unrestrained affects follow spatial ideas that necessitate an <\/span>emotional reaction, as these sculptures cannot be described in any rational way beforehand. <\/span>The fragmentation and reassembly of parts stems not from contradictory processes, but from a<\/span>
necessary dualism. It is a method that pervades this sculptor\u2019s oeuvre. And once again in the <\/span>Flying Catacombs<\/em>, <\/span>the irrational becomes a genetic principle; the apparent monumentality of <\/span>his subjects turns out to be a factor of ongoing uncertainty, destabilizing our perception. Yet <\/span>the confused trajectories of their components and permanent collision can also be explained <\/span>by the laws of scale and gravity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Confronted with a growing abundance of civilizational shards and fragments, some sculptors dwell on the decorations of a self-referential rhetoric. It\u2019s easy to lose sight of one\u2019s own <\/span>responsibility and where it ends, particularly where the origin of the shards is lost. And yet <\/span>fragmentary contemporary sculpture, a category to which Thomas Virnich\u2019s works also <\/span>belong, asserts itself by credibly claiming the idea of a radically open sculpture. There is no <\/span>doubt that so long as it fends off representational ambitions, its subjective symbolic power <\/span>will diminish. It will inevitably assume the same, doctrinaire qualities held by the statuary and <\/span>permanent monuments it claims to subvert.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Thomas Virnich denies us anything definitive. He deprives the found reality of originality through subjective simulation; he abnegates material fidelity and a sense of order. But his <\/span>sculptures have a memory of all they have experienced and all the expectations they have yet <\/span>to face. In this way, they are present: both in their creation and in their dissolution. Imbued <\/span>with this characteristic, ongoing conflict, they contain additional information about our world <\/span>in the manner of insertions that offer no ready-made solutions, that are unpredictable, <\/span>provisional, at times defiant, yet wide open. They are the starting points for pathways that <\/span>subvert our mental registries for order and beauty in all their presumably useless, disorienting <\/span>disorder\u2014and open up positive spaces for hope and possibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n


Uwe Jens Gellner<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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

THOMAS VIRNICH (DE)
\n26.01.2004 \u2013 30.04.2004<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,31,240],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exh-archive-gdkm","category-exhibition","category-pk-tv-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24119","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=24119"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33810,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24119\/revisions\/33810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumdkm.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}