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Gunter Frentzel |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 27th of February 2008 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. a great solo-exhibition with works of the Swiss artist Gunter Frentzel. Dr. Christoph Vögele will give an introduction in his artistic œuvre. Frentzel’s sculptures were primarily exhibited at the gallery within a group-exhibition in summer 2000 and lastly in a solo-exhibition in 2003. In the upcoming exhibition not only indoor and outdoor sculptures but also marker-drawings will be presented for the very first time. They represent the consistent continuation of the linear in the two-dimensional pictorial space.
Gunter Frentzel was born in Berlin in 1935, graduated as a sculptor at the Kunsthochschule Wiesbaden in 1956 and moved to Switzerland four years after, where he still lives and works today. The multiple art prize laureate of the canton Solothurn belongs to the most well-known sculptors of the country. His sculptures are part of international collections and in several cities they characterize the public space. Amongst others in 1987/88 the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris and in 1990 the Kunstmuseum Solothurn and the Kunsthalle Winterthur organized large solo-exhibitions. In 1990 his works were also shown in the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Genf and the Gulbenkian-Foundation in Lissabon. He recently created a monumental iron sculpture for a wall of 15 m length at the Galerie der Stiftung DKM in Duisburg in 2006. In 2010 the Kunstmuseum Bern will stage a major retrospective of his œuvre.
Frentzel exclusively composes his sculptures of industrial produced intermediate goods as four cornered shafts and plates of iron and chrome steel – until 1997 sometimes combined with ashlar rocks. Thereby he avoided any kind of individual handwriting; the surface of the steel elements remains raw. The equality of the elements without any compositional hierarchy is essential. His sculptures consist of an arrangement of identical individual parts, which are balanced just by weight and counter weight. Frentzel does not use any fixtures as scrubs, clips or welt spots. His design principle relies on precise adjustment, layering and leaning of the component parts according to certain regularities. For instance the artist shifts the four cornered shafts of the exhibited spiral work (2007) according to their diameter on the circular outline of the work. Hence his design principle consequentially determines the size and the closure of the sculpture.
In terms of the cancellation of the artistic handwriting, the use of industrial products and the serial repetition of geometrical structures Gunter Frentzel is rooted in Minimal Art. Though he creates his sculptures less by method than by experiments and intuition. He loves the risk and always stratifies to the static limit. Any further rod would loose the grip or provoke the collapse of the sculpture. The great amount of superposed and interleaved bars builds up a complex lattice, which unfolds in interaction with light and shadow a fascinating interplay of the lines. By the multiplication of single items he manages to set static into motion (Moiré-effect) and creates a dynamic, which activates the spectator to constantly change his point of view in order to detect new aspects from different perspectives. Here the separate items merge to a compact surface and there they recover their discreteness. It is an interplay that relies on the slender volume of the steel elements, which Frentzel chooses for his work. They do not appear as massive bodies but as narrow lines or cuts in space with their shadows as constituents of the sculpture.
The German word “Verzeichnung”, which entitles the exhibition, does not only allude to the optic phenomenon of distortion, but also refers to the graphical aspect (“Zeichnung”: graphic / drawing) as a main characteristic of Gunter Frentzel’s three-dimensional artworks. Therefore it seems to be a chain of reasoning that in 2007 the artist starts to extend his practical analysis of form and space to drawings. Here he textures the pictorial space with unpretentious lines of a marker. These works on paper as well as his sculptures stand out due their striking simplicity, by which Gunter Frentzel creates an amazing variety of shapes and structures.
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