Sealed Vessels
05 dec 2018 – 28 feb 2019
Fourth solo show hosted in the gallery’s spaces by Florian Neufeldt (1976), a German artist based in Berlin.
Committed to relate his sculptural practice to the spaces and architectures hosting his works, Florian Neufeldt further develops the central theme by making the exhibition space the content of his art and assigning the role of container not only to the gallery’s structure as such, but also to the objects found, which the artist usually selects and forges for the purpose of his formal research.
The show Sealed Vessels deals with containers in a broader sense. Since the early beginnings of humanity and its culture containers in every form, size, and functional purpose have played a crucial role in managing the daily life and survival. Be it caves as shelters, holes for storage or bowls to drink water. All these containers haven’t lost any significance and can be seen as one of the grounds our civilization is based upon.
Humans have oftentimes drawn inspiration from nature, trying to copy it and its seemingly perfect models. One of these natural products is the egg whose extraordinary qualities have inspired all kinds of objects, architectures and more or less scientific theories. Even more than these theories, though, it is the religion in various forms which has incorporated the egg as a symbolic form and created an aura still gleaming.
So if the egg as a container obviously evokes a content involving life and therefore high and auratic categories and principles, the industrial reality and mass-production mostly succeeds in disposing this aura. The title giving series Sealed Vessels contrasts eggs with human-made industrial metal containers featuring quite similar shapes. Reduced to their basic forms, with all attachments cut off and the openings sealed through welding, these standard containers for gases and liquids serve as a pedestal for the natural paradigm (the egg) which, regarding its strangely balanced position on the metal containers, might seem somehow attached to its epigone.
However, it is in the basement of the gallery that Florian Neufeldt leads to extreme consequences the short circuit between content and container, between form and void. The space accessible to the viewer is drastically reduced due to the unexpected presence of a previously non-existent wall, which, on the one hand, compresses the exhibition space imposing a claustrophobic approach to the visit; on the other hand, it is presented as a container (once again) of artworks embedded in the wall and, finally, it inevitably evokes the presence of a larger space that, beyond the wall itself, suggests to the imagination about a huge void.
To round off the exhibit there is a video that, once again, highlights the unique approach of Florian Neufeldt to the medium, already used on other events but always with a sculptural approach, aimed at exploiting with simplicity and, at the same time, with depth the predisposition of the moving image to fathom any possible relationship between the object and the surrounding space.
THE GALLERY APART
Via Francesco Negri 43
Rome
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