Two-dimensional sculpture and three-dimensional drawing

For many people familiar with the work of Christina Zurfluh this exhibition may be somewhat surprising: no large-format colourful pictures, paper works and sculptures but instead delicate monochrome sculptures connected to the space around them and small-format drawings, also monochrome.

Nevertheless, the artist has hung one of her pictures in the back room of the gallery as a point of reference, showing that these works have a continuous relationship to her earlier works. It makes the connection to her older works in which the paint was applied in thick layers and then partly removed in accordance with particular systems so as to become painting based on removing and not on applying paint.

It was and is a central strategy of Zurfluh to rework things even when she produces her raw materials herself. In the paper works of this time the remains of paint on the studio floor are the raw materials. This strategy does not have to do with creating something out of nothing or simply depicting something but rather it is always about transforming something at hand and thereby putting the act of transformation (or reworking) into sharp focus. In the process it is repeatedly a matter of the relationship between the characteristics of the material and object and the flat nature of the picture. In her work the two poles are connected in continually new forms as far as insolubility. T

he history of the drawings in the exhibition naturally begins with the old pictures with the exposed layers and goes on to wall surfaces in New York on which posters and other things had been pasted over and over again, which she then tore off so that they took on a very similar structure to the pictures. The artist then in turn photographed them and led them back into two-dimensionality – and it is these photographs which in turn form the starting point of the exhibition. We thus have a whole chain of representations before us which are held together by a multiplicity of relationships. If the photographs are inspiration for the drawings, they transport with them the layers that they depict but also their history in which they were originally created from individual paper surfaces.

The process is strongly reminiscent of a translation in which a text is translated from one language into the next so as perhaps at some time to end up in the original language again in a greatly changed form. It is just that in this case no meaning gets lost because in Christina Zurfluh's art it is about the possibilities and characteristics of the translation itself and not a question of content that is external to art. In the monochrome drawings the individual lines come together into something like meshworks of wire which at a deep level, appearing almost surrealistic, return to three-dimensionality and at the same time once again distance themselves from the figures adhering to the surface. What at first looks like a simple fantasy structure then proves itself to be an arrangement with a complex history. The charged nature of the drawings confronts the lightness of the sculptures. Here too it is about the relationship of surface versus object, it is just that the direction is the opposite one.

At first glance the sculpture in the entrance area of the gallery appears like a wall painting – it brings to mind works by Sol Lewitt – and only later does it become clear that something is happening in the surrounding space. The illusion suggests surface in exactly the same way as the drawings suggest space. The strings are dematerialised while the lines become physical objects. But then it again becomes clear that Zurfluh re-establishes the object in that she again makes visible the energies in the space through the weights. It is noticeable here that the line is subject to physical laws. In the second sculpture a space in a space is drawn, which then however again, in different perspectives and through the heaviness of the weights, transforms itself into a three-dimensional object. Rarely at an exhibition is the relationship between object and picture, the material and the dematerial, addressed in such a multilayered way and, at the same time, the history of the artist and also the art so clearly reflected with it. 

Martin Prinzhorn
translation Steve Gander