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Joachim Bandau |
The Baukunst Galerie opens at Wednesday, the 31st of August 2005 from 18.00 to 21.00 p.m. with an introduction by Prof. Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger, a great solo-exhibition of the works by the artist and sculptor Joachim Bandau: Sculptures from the beginning of the eighties up to the present will be exhibited in the garden and the inside of the gallery. Besides that the gallery will also present current “black watercolour paintings”. At the same time Kunstraum Fuhrwerkswaage in Köln-Sürth shows a purpose-built installation of approximately 50 sculptures out of plumb titled „Diverse Boinsai“ from the 4th to the 9th of October 2005 (Opening: Sunday, the 4th of October 2005, 11.30 a.m.).
Joachim Bandau was born 1936 in Cologne. After his studies at the State Academy of Arts in Dresden 1957-60 he started working on sculptures at 1962. The years around 1975 were a great caesura in his opus: The sculptures out of polyester, varnish and polished aluminium he created before 1978 fundamentally differ from the ones he produced after that point. During the years of radical change from 1976 to 1978 Bandau starts to experiment with the subject of the bunker – at first exceptionally by drawing. In the following years the bunker gains in importance within his sculptural opus: with regard to its content as a metaphor of the ambiguity of protection and threat and with regard to its shape as a model for the examination of the sculptural relation between positive and negative, inside and outside, cover and core. Even though Bandau has retracted the bunker in the title of his objects later in order to broad the realm of associations, the bunker is still the model for the ambivalence and dialectics of his works: a shape radically reduced and at the same time impregnated with content.
Without loosing sight of this subject in his current sculptures it is superposed with questions concerning the form: In the exhibited works Bandau examined the issues “cover and cavity”, “cover and core”, “grouting” and “asymmetry”. Furthermore the issue of “landscape” is broached as a field of coordinates between space, base and objects. The close vision of the works gives a hint to its formal structure: splices refer to an inner construction out of different constituent parts; apertures deliver insight in hollow spaces; forefronts mislead about back sides; plug connections are precisely fit into one another; insides become voluminous bodies. Although an construction out of separate parts seems to implicate a rearrangement in fact the weight of the massive iron elements makes them unalterable. When they are perfectly fit into one another even to an alert eye the construction will not be apparent: The complex structure can not be investigated by perception. Imagination takes place of perception. This way Bandau’s sculptures refer less to reality than to the potentiality of our perception and construction of reality.
Bandau’s “black watercolour paintings” give an impression of his unbreakable striving for form. These extremely reduced works have nothing in common with conventional sculptor drawings, but have to be looked at completely autonomous. Bandau submits himself to a ritual of painting which demands an atmosphere of lightness, cleanliness, concentration, patience and silence: He applies pigments with a broad, Japanese, hair-brush in an alternation of painting and drying layer per layer on the surface of the paper. The basic elements of all papers are fields of black pigment. Lines are just results from built-ups of the pigments at the boundaries of the fields during process of drying. In those areas, where the fields of black pigment touch or overly each other, fan out or built up rhombi transparent spaces of architectural quality are opened up: walls, rooms, corridors or windows but also associations with processes in time and space are aroused.
The convincing about the “black watercolour paintings” of Joachim Bandau is – analogue to his sculptures – the ambivalence of open transparency and hidden mysteriousness, of reduced shape and associative content.
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