ART-PRESENTATION: Florian Hecker-Formulations

Florian Hecker in his sound installations and live performances, he deals with specific compositional developments of post-war modernity, electro-acoustic music, and other, non-musical disciplines. He dramatizes space, time and self-perception in his sonic works by isolating specific auditory events in their singularity, thus stretching the boundaries of their materialization.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MMK Archive

Florian Hecker in his solo exhibition “Formulations” at the MMK 3 of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt presents 15 extant works and 2 new ones executed between 2004 and 2016. In the main gallery of the MMK 3, the artist has arranged 16 works tailored to this specific space. Following meticulously planned choreographies, they will be enacted over the course of each exhibition day. The work “Modulator” (2012) is on view in a room built into the ground floor. For the exhibition, Hecker has chosen to concentrate on a selection of works for which the concepts of synthesis, analysis and resynthesis are of key importance. Here sound is analysed, formalized, and subsequently reproduced on the basis of its qualitative and quantitative properties. This results in reproductions of complete works or synthetic replicas of isolated sound characters from which the artist composes his pieces. The new work, “Modulator (Scattering Transform)” (2016), carries out this procedure in a fourteen-stage resynthesis of the existing work “Modulator” (2012), thus virtually multiplying our understanding of the concept of timbre. Many of Hecker’s more recent works are composed in triple symmetries, for example “2×3 Channel” (2009), “Affordance” (2013) and “Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera” (2011). With these works Hecker deliberately confronts the recipient with three sound sources that are not only spatially staggered but also different from one another in terms of content. This animates the recipient to move through the room and remember what he has already heard, as it is only in its simultaneity that the work can be grasped in its entirety.

Info: Curator Anna Goetz, MMK 3, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt/Main, Zollamt, Domstraße 3, Frankfurt, Duration: 26/11/16-5/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, http://mmk-frankfurt.de