Museums or Mausoleums?
Is Sculpture Dead or Just Upended?
Read how contemporary sculptors are challenging art traditions in this biennial art exhibition.
Sculptors from around the world are exhibiting at Blickachsen 10 in Bad Homburg and Frankfurt RheinMain.
This contemporary sculpture event happens every other year. Blickachsen 10 opened May 31 and runs through Oct 4, 2015.
Leo Copers, a Belgian sculptor, has installed his piece, “Irom Etra Orp Tse Muroced te Eclud” as a commentary on museums, continuing his statement that he began in the 1970s.
His ‘museum graveyard’ takes up from this theme under the title “IROM ETRA ORP TSE MUROCED TE ECLUD”. Read backwards, the ironic title (Eng., “It is sweet and honourable to die for art”) is a modification of Horace’s verse about dying for one’s country, in which Copers replaces the word “patria” (country) with “arte” (art). The installation consists of 111 granite headstones on which the logos and names of art museums have been engraved, each in its characteristic typeface. Alongside his criticism of today’s museums and the ubiquitous diktat of big names, Copers also denounces in this work the transformation of famous cemeteries into museum attractions to which tourists flock in their hordes.
Luc Deleu, also from Belgium, has contributed his piece, “The Container” to the current exhibition. Working with containers as part of art installations since the 1980s, he shifts his style and puts a single container on end.
Deleu is concerned with the perception of scale and perspective in the public space. As early as the 1980s he started to work with containers – arranging them in large-scale geometric forms, piling them up on top of each other, or assembling them into bridges and gateways. In “Blickachsen 10” by contrast, he audaciously balances a standard red container of the “Hamburg Süd” company on one of its corners in the Bad Homburg Kurpark. His aim is to increase the observer’s awareness of volume, of spatial capacity. This becomes especially clear in the relationship of the object to its surroundings: the spectacularly tilted “Container” has a monumental power in relation to the ancient trees of the Kurpark.
Learn more about this contemporary art exhibition stunningly set to contrast with the traditional settings, and the artists whose works are installed in Blickachsen 1o.
Leo Copers, “Irom Etra Orp Tse Muroced te Eclud”image from Blickachsen.com
Luc Deleu, The Container, image from Blickachsen.com
