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2009
series of 5 drawings, charcoal on paper, 225 x 148 cm each
BETONBAR, a project of Jörg Wagner and Jan Stieding
hosted by Philipp Morlock
Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, DE
Betonbar (concrete bar) is a project of the artists Jörg Wagner and Jan Stieding. As part of other artists’ exhibition projects—in this case, Philip Morlock’s solo show at the Mannheimer Kunstverein—Jörg Wagner casts a bar of concrete for a single evening of drinking, dancing, and talking that is subsequently destroyed. A decoration of five large-format charcoal drawings was realized as a contribution to this ephemeral exhibition event; their title alludes to the material the short-lived bar is made of, otherwise a symbol of permanence and immovability. In both formal and motivic terms, however, the drawings are anything but concrete. They play with the volatility of the charcoal dust and the possibility of alternating at any moment between positive and negative drawing (the latter by wiping and by means of the vacuum cleaner). This renders the diffuse pictorial space explicitly transparent toward the process of drawing. Between abstract and blurry hachures and intricately folded wiry lines that lose their way in the pictorial space, there are also several motifs that, less deformed, might even be made of concrete, such as a group of flying perforated bricks (they do stare at us, though) and a sort of fountain with a pedestal and a jellyfishy-polymorphous proboscidean next to it. A main element in the drawings is a new type of soap bubble, which, having been crossbred with a burr or a chestnut, is still weightless and semitransparent but now also prickly.