Christian Lemmerz
Christian Lemmerz was trained as a sculptor, but characteristic of his artistic activity is that he works with many different forms of expression. He chooses materials according to their potential for making statements and according to the artistic strategy. In addition to his work with sculpture, he has been making drawings, performances, set design, installations and films.
In the beginning of the 1980s, he took part in the anarchistic work community, Værkstedet Værst, and, together with his colleague, the painter Michael Kvium, in the performance group Værst. From the time around the middle of the 80s, the self-contained work with sculpture and installation became his primary form of expression.
Lemmerz's works are stamped by a profound awareness of art history and cultural history. He avails himself of the European sculpture tradition and employs the body - as the sensing figure - as the point of departure for a critique of those clichés that enclose existence's important events.
From the outset, Death has stood as a central artistic theme. Not only physical death, but also the emptiness of existence. His works attempt, not without some measure of ambiguity, to transgress our collective repressions and draw forth the seamy side of ideal pictures in order to create a conflict-ridden confrontation between work and viewer. As Lemmerz has put it, art has to operate in a profoundly disturbing way, like some unfamiliar smouldering danger, where provocation entails confrontation.
This provocative and confrontational strategy can be seen translated into the conception of the impossible sculpture, where anti-aesthetic and institutional critical grasps are applied and where the choice of materials has consisted, among other things, of margarine, blood and entrails from animals, combined with imperishable industrial materials.
Lemmerz has created a number of more stringently formal works in plaster and bronze, on the basis of more philosophical themes. And as one of the very few contemporary artists to do so, Lemmerz has since 1996 resumed working with the white Italian marble, a material that has almost been rendered taboo in post-modern art.
Playing upon the customary notions of classicism with a touch of black irony, Lemmerz takes the ancient Greek sculpture of Hermes and the Dionysus child and rewrites the work in Adam Kadmon (1997-98) into a transgressive and perverted copy, where Hermes has turned into Adam, as a transvestite, and the Dionysus child has become the Jesus baby and has been given sadistic features.
Untitled (Virginia) (1998), which takes its point of departure in a police photograph of a murder case where a young prostitute was brutally murdered, presents an extraordinarily radical juxtaposition of the classic conception of beauty with the repulsive sex slaying.
For Christian Lemmerz the challenge lies with working in the tension between application of the Classical sculptural tradition and a break with this. With his figural bronze sculpture Rio Kid (2003) Lemmerz had taken on an impossible project: the actualisation of the realistic figural sculpture with an actual political motive, surrounded by all the kitsch and pathos intrinsic to this type of child sculpture known from Classical works of art to churchyard figures.
It is also this collocation of high and low, the profane and the sacred, which characterizes The Wake (2000), an eight-hour long silent-film paraphrase of James Joyce's avant-garde novel "Finnegans Wake" where Lemmerz, in collaboration with the painter Michael Kvium, puts the picture in focus, in preference to the narrative, and shows to us the nocturnal side of our consciousness. It is captivating, even if these are not always pictures that we really like looking at.
City of God (CPH) from 2006 is large model depicting the city of Copenhagen bombed beyond recognition - thoroughly executed in white foam. The model resembles a grotesque anti-architectural model. The white colour, usually associated with purity and in architectural models, new visionary projects for the future, is in Lemmerz’ version reverted to a vision of our fears and powerless awaiting the possibility of a terror attack on Copenhagen.
Regardless of whether he is working with marble sculptures, charcoal drawings, or films, it is clear that he is working on the basis of a tradition where making pictures with an existential or a society-related content is in focus - maybe it's all a utopian attempt to secure meaning in the mass culture's and the mass media's flow. But nonetheless, Lemmerz aspires to fight back the image and he regards visual art today as the domain that has the potential to regenerate culture's refuse.
Christian Lemmerz' works consistently visualise relations to do with our current time and reality. His content-based art insist on the visual formulation of existential questions.