For the first time we are showing the two artists Constantin Luser and Fritz Panzer together in an exhibition they conceived entitled "4 o'clock".
Wednesday and Thursday, October 18 and 19, 2023 the gallery will be closed due to the autumn vacations. On October 20, we are again as usual present for you at Poststrasse 48.
Outline and Identity
by Thomas D. Trummer, Director Kunsthaus Bregenz
The wire winds around itself, transforming into curled lines and filigree screws. Occasionally it branches out and frays, the bare ends remain visible - a hint of deception. Fritz Panzer (*1945) thinks of things from their contours. His sculptures owe their origin to drawings that become spatial through wire formations. Panzer reshapes the outer contours, disregarding the substance, the interior, the core and even the outer shell of things. For this exhibition, he limits himself to black wire. The objects seem like drawings that reveal themselves like frottages of their outer edges. Some of these constructions are reminiscent of tinkered placeholders, others of life-size dummies that attempt to reproduce the simplicity of things. At times they seem like dummies that make us ponder how to deal with emptiness, an existence in the presence of nothingness. At the same time, Panzer's wire formations do not follow ontological experiments, but rather reveal themselves as sculptural commentaries on use. Panzer chooses simple everyday objects that are waiting to be used. He presents them in a humble presence, silent and patient. Here we find a suitcase, a clock, an empty picture frame, two work trestles, and two interconnected neon tubes. The world of domestic objects appears as trace and incidental, in an observation that is as sparse as it is laconic. All these things are familiar representatives of life, simple witnesses in the still life of the self.
Constantin Luser (*1976) also comes to sculpture via drawing. In doing so, Luser cites modernism. Some of his delicate structures are reminiscent of Bauhaus art or Antoine Pevsner's Constructivism, others of Alexander Calder's mobiles or the silhouettes of early photography. While Panzer isolates things and ascribes a familiar identity to them, in Luser's work they are rather markers of states and torn open in a positional game of fleeting presence. To show that states are never static and arrestable, Luser frees his sculptures from the wall and explores the angle of incidence of the gaze at great expense. Luser's wire sculptures are based on an idea of open constellation. Unlike Panzer's, they are not so much evidence of a sober inventory as they are spatial studies of the elegance and variety of illusion. In many cases they are similar to pieces of jewelry and embossed ornamental art. Luser, who also builds surreal instruments, chooses for his objects precious metals, those that shine and can be artfully turned. He presents the spatial outlines not only as contours, but in constrictions and parallels, making the wire works reminiscent of graphic hatchings. He often lets his works hang freely like ball-like structures. It is only when they are circled - either by the viewer's own movement or by the viewer's gaze - that they reveal their principle of construction. Only for a moment, for example, does a portrait head become a bust, a face that can be interpreted.
