ART CITIES: Berlin -Simon Schubert
Simon Schubert works across several mediums and his installation-oriented exhibitions are often inspired by literary and philosophical sources, also the artist creates intricate paper works of interior portraits by carefully folding plain white paper, pushing the limits of drawing. The folded lines of these works reveal delicate interiors of real buildings. Schubert says that the series was inspired by the light-filled portraits of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Wagner + Partner Archive
Simon Schubert for “Jenseits von Ideen”, his first exhibition with the Galerie Wagner + Partner in Berlin, leads us through the earth , like Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s story into a room dressed with papered pictorial reliefs. This room is the beginning of a major artistic project, in which the artist creates a kind of accessible, fully-clad paper house, in which his reliefs, due to their association with one another, create the illusion of an actual house that reveals views both through and to the outside. The viewer arrives in this room after they have traversed the gallery corridor, which is covered with soil. In the first room of the exhibition one is introduced to Schubert’s play with spatiality and narrative, in which time and space appear to be overruled. Schubert’s unique paper folding technique establishes further spatial illusions: where lines and shadows complicitly amass space and make subtle gradients visible. It is Schubert’s treatment of each piece of paper that makes the installation possible and in so doing; an illusionary, two-dimensional concertina drawing becomes a spatial drawing. In a statement about his works on white paper, the artist says: “The works often show interiors from the end of the 19th Century reminding the spectator of ‘haunted mansions’. The pictures of the endless hallways with closed doors, the blind windows, the empty halls and the winding staircases appear to be single views of tremendous, labyrinthine building, which seems to continue ever further into the white”. The primarily white paper folds are contrasted with white-through-black graphite drawings, which through the aid of strong light/dark contrast, illustrate rooms and houses at night that are illuminated only via the reflection of light sources. These houses are partly engulfed by a blaze or are only dimly visible in the twilight. Simon Schubert harnesses paper, sculpture and video to create individual images of rooms and actual constructed rooms as parts of a near endless, steadily expanding network. The visitor is transported into a surreal and suggestive world, in which endless entrances and exits are revealed from inside and out. Simon Schubert, who mentions Samuel Beckett and Edgar Allan Poe as his biggest influences, raises the most existential and fundamental questions. Loneliness, isolation, loss and disappearance are the reoccurring issues in his paper works and sculptures. The mysterious and unsettling atmosphere his works radiate confronts the viewer with his own subconscious fears and anxieties.
Info: Galerie Wagner + Partner, Strausberger Platz 8, Berlin, Duration: 24/6-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 13:00-18:00, www.galerie-wagner-partner.com
