“It is impossible, then, that sight can be the mother of this art.” Herder

And elsewhere in Sculpture:

“Consider the lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture…He shifts from place to place, his eye becomes his hand and the ray of light his finger, or rather his soul has a finger that is yet finer than his hand or the ray of light. With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as it feels. A cold description of a statue no more offers us appropriate ideas than would a pictorial representation of music; better to leave it be and pass by.”

Maybe this last sentence tells us the most, with its comparison of senses and its appeal to a consideration of all the senses and to a psychosomatic view of the person as intellect, feeling and body, and as living in the world in this way. At the same time there is an appeal to the idea that an artwork is a living thing, a thing almost like us.

Schmücker – About the senses, and the issues of seeing and touching and sculpture and material:

“I wonder if it’s different for people who have no experience with a certain material, and for people who have a ‘learned’ or some other experience with material. I for example don’t know what the dust on the moon feels like, I can only assume. Neil Armstrong knows! Or I don’t know how heavy a bowl of molten bronze is, I never lifted one – whereas somebody who works with this material knows exactly how it behaves. I simply wonder how this influences perception. Material knowledge is also really important for burglars and forgers. Can you tap a wall and tell me its thickness?”

Michel Giroud, writing about Jacques Villeglé’s torn poster pictures says that what the torn poster ‘paintings’ of Villeglé and others do is confront normal painting, re-enforcing those which have genuine visual ideas, and showing up those which are merely ‘rhetorical’. I think Schmücker sees her artists as doing something similar with regard to sculpture: they make us look at other sculpture and see its sculptural qualities. My point here of course is that Villeglé ‘s work consists of raw, found material – it’s very much about the idea of the material, and the material producing, almost of its own accord, the ‘meaning’. For that reason I think the comparison apt.
……
(Excerpt from David Lillington, Freies Material, April 2011)

A limited edition multiple with work by all artists and a text by David Lillington will be made available for €120 / £100 at the opening and throughout the exhibition. Please email Martina Schmücker: tina.2@gmx.de if you would like to purchase a multiple.

The exhibition is supported by the British Council