Christian Lemmerz
Rio
12.09.03 - 15.11.03
Christian Lemmerz' solo exhibition at Galleri Faurschou will exhibit his artistic reflections on his recent two years stay in Brazil.
The new bronze sculpture 'Rio Kid' portrays a street kid sniffing glue- attempted hidden underneath his oversize t-shirt. An encounter which daily greeted the artist at the local 'piazza' in Rio. A meeting that for Lemmerz, gave rise to the well-known feeling of shame and powerlessness by being a privileged Western spectator in a part of the world where vast economic inequalities and social problems result in difficulties for those of a lesser privilege.
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. In his works this strategy is tightly incorporated into conceptual and formal reflections tracing back to Michelangelo, Duchamp and Beuys.
When Lemmerz seeks to transfer the meeting with Rio's glue-sniffing street kids onto the confrontation between work and viewer, he deliberately abstain from displaying the overexposed documentary photography, but rather choose the exclusive bronze as medium.
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 Lemmerz has taken on an impossible project: the actualisation of a 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.
The boy from Rio has been taken out of place and context and is now exposed and for sale at the gallery. Exclusive and pathetic as well as beautiful and painful, all at once. In this ambivalence Christian Lemmerz has transformed his feeling of powerlessness in Rio into a powerful work uniting irony, pain and beauty and the work extends beyond its concrete geographic context and starting point.
Illustrating the extensive and time-consuming work with bronze and marble sculpture, central to Lemmerz' artistic expression of late, a number of drawings exhibited illustrate how Lemmerz applies drawing as visual thinking. The drawings are visual notes of a process, in which both details and general reflections and ideas are tested in Lemmerz' characteristic and classically trained lines.