Anne Wenzel
BLACK GIRL, Installation view TENT, ceramic sculpture
Anne Wenzel
Untitled [Black Deer], ceramic sculpture, 170 x 140 x 150
 Silent
Landscape, detail of installation view, 2006
Anne Wenzel
Tsunami I [submerged car ], 2006, priv. coll |
 |
ANNE WENZEL
lives and works in Rotterdam
born 1972, Germany
The Agency is pleased to premier the sculptures of the
Rotterdam artist Anne Wenzel in London. Following on from her current
exhibition at OneTwenty gallery in Ghent, Wenzel will present part II
of her large-scale sculptural installations in London. Anne Wenzel works
almost exclusively with ceramics often on a scale, which challenges the
boundaries of traditional firing methods as well as the known forms of
the medium itself. At OneTwenty she highlighted the impressive sculpture
Untitled [Black Deer] which at 170 in height and 170 cm in diameter of
solid black glazed ceramics on a steel platform in conjunction with earlier
pieces from her “Sweet Life” exhibition at TENT, the Centre
for Fine Arts museum space in Rotterdam.
For the Agency she will present a room size installation
made of no less than 35 individual ceramic sculpture components.
Anne Wenzel's choice of material and technique is unusual. Having learnt
how to mould and fire sculptures traditionally at Hertogenbosch in the
Netherlands, she applied this to the subversion of the traditional ceramics.
She up-scaled quaint figurines of deers and humans from appeasing nature
scenes to life-size and added a dark edge to them, often amalgamating
human and animal figures to an amorphous mesh.
For her forthcoming show at the Agency she has chosen
the topic of landscape to undergo her treatment of subversion. The individual
sculptures of 50cm diameter and approx 70 cm in height are small scenes
of broken pine trees with debris of wooden planks, half-destroyed foundations
of houses, broken wooden huts and submerged cars, all moulded from black
glazed ceramics. Joined together on a large-scale platform they become
a vast wounded landscape, at once beautiful and noticeably scarred. As
an installation it becomes evident that the symbolically marred elements
of forests and human habitation are a representation of disaster. The
forestation and mere foundations do not reveal the landscape to be of
any particular origin, yet the recent collective memory places them in
the wake of the Asian tsunami and American hurricanes.
Wenzel represents nature as it can be found after intervention
by extreme natural forces or more darkly perhaps by human intervention.
The shiny black glaze mixed with dark brown tones of fired and unglazed
clay is as much reminiscent of burning as it may be of mud. Bearing in
mind Anne Wenzel’s German origin and her critical distance to it
having been resident in the Netherlands for over fourteen years, her
sculpture calls to mind Anselm Kiefer’s almost three dimensional
relief painting March Sands (1980) of scorched earth painted with sand
and straw mixed into the oil medium. Wenzel is clearly of a different
generation therefore her work takes on a more global meaning yet the
desire for a call to order is just as powerful. The forest Wenzel builds
bears no reference to any geographical area in particular. It literally
just is a destroyed forest, which speaks of human presence without ever
representing it.
Startling in her work is the formal uniformity, which
is created in part by the even colouring and the repetition of various
natural and man-made shapes, despite every piece being unique. The fact
she uses ceramics here has little to do with a continuation of a traditional
art form. It has rather to do with a literal use of earth/clay as a means
of expressing the malleability of this material by both external forces
and the performative intervention of her hands. |
