ART CITIES:Hamburg-Nicole Wermers
In her sculptures, photographs and collages, Nicole Wermers connects formal considerations with a discussion about urban space and its social, economical and psychological aspects. Combining references to art history with modern surfaces and materials, the artist explores fine art aesthetics within the design of daily life, specifically the ways it has been appropriated by consumer culture.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunstverein in Hamburg Archive
“Women Between Buildings”, is Nicole Wermers first survey exhibition in Germany. Combining and re-configuring familiar objects into new material forms, Wermers addresses the structures of ritualised social relations and the material objects through which these associations are communicated. These works transform, contain, and frame their environment, prompting a deeper consideration of how surface and design read as social and cultural indicators. The title of the exhibition alludes to the standard work on urban planning, “Life between Buildings” by Jan Gehl from the 1970s, in which he writes about the responsibility of urban planning and describes transit and communication zones as indispensable for establishing a community. But Wermers focuses on the reality of commodified urban transit spaces, where concepts such as community are associated more with the ad campaign of an insurance company. The exhibition features works from the past 10 years, including “Untitled Chairs” of the exhibition “Infrastruktur” which was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2015, as well as two new sculptures created especially for the Kunstverein in Hamburg. The earliest work on display, the video “Palisades” (1998) produced during Wermers’ time in Hamburg, marks the start and simultaneously frames the content of the show. The artist appropriates semi-public spaces with the camera held upside down, giving the impression of walking on the ceiling. Hotels, corporate lobbies and the CCH Hamburg become enigmatic, interchangeable, endless architectures, whose functionless details appear as abstract sculptures or ornaments. The series “Vertical Awnings” (2016) are sculptures made of long rolls of fabric which have been re-purposed to stand upright in the gallery space. Textiles are often used to subdivide, appropriate, privatize, shade, domesticate, or even generate public space. Their suitability for this purpose has to do with their material properties (textiles are flexible, permeable and stretchable), and also with the way we perceive them as harmless and unthreatening. A textile border always appears negotiable. Wermers’ wall works titled “Mood Boards” (2016) are misappropriated, foldable, diaper- changing tables from public toilets that create practical surfaces in close quarters. The artist cast different-colored terrazzo into them. Floor, traditionally at the low end of the architectural canon of values, is raised to the level of the display. As with the “Mood Boards”, the “Dishwashing Sculptures” (2013-17) are adapted ready-mades that play with degrees of function and misappropriation, but in this case transferred to the domestic environment. In precarious assemblages of pots, porcelain and kitchen devices stacked as if to dry, architectural ambition and daring statics form a contrast to female-connoted reproductive labour.
Info: Kunstverein in Hamburg, Klosterwall 23, Hamburg, Duration 3/3-6/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 12:00-18:00, http://kunstverein.de
