ART CITIES:Berlin-Claudia Comte

The work Claudia Comte is characterized by her use of a simple language of forms and her engagement with different media, such as sculpture, printmaking, installation and painting, which she presents in a spatial manner. In so doing, this artist from Switzerland revives traditional artisanal methods and explores the relationships between the visual languages of art history and popular culture. The artist finds the inspiration for her site-specific works in her environment: in nature, architecture and culture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: König Galerie Archive

In Claudia’s Comte solo exhibition “Catch the Tail by the Tiger” at König Galerie in Berlin, is on view a selection of Comte’s amorphous wooden sculptures in their shelf-like interiors and her target paintings. Her practice mainly involves geometrical abstractions of sculpture and painting. Comte’s typical gallery installation combines painting, wall hangings, and sculptures and their plinths, with each given equal importance. She will generally plan one component so that dimensions and colors interplay with the other parts, and resonate within the space at large. From the techniques to the materials, and her relationship with art history, Comte’s work retains an almost miraculous structural integrity despite being pulled in several directions at once.  The arrangement of the plinths is organized according to a virtual grid as well as the stripes that adorn their surfaces, which have been burned black with a blow torch, and incised precisely five centimeters apart, with a chainsaw wielded by the artist’s own hand. The same hand fashioned the amorphous, fluidly shaped objects nested among the interiors out of wood However, unlike the plinths, these shapes are so finely worked and finished that their facture is all but undetectable in their surfaces; the objects are almost eerie in their ethereal hardness, ultimately looking all but machine-made. Her influences are numerous and easily recognizable, among others: Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Bridget Rilley, Daniel Buren and Barbara Herpworth.

Info: König Galerie, Alexandrinenstraße 118-121, Berlin, Duration: 29/4-29/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.koeniggalerie.com