Hubertus von der Goltz: Balance and Perspective
There’s something new on the front of the building that houses Fassbender Gallery. A thin piece of black metal juts sideways and upward from the brick wall, way above your head. A man’s metal silhouette perches precariously on it; in a wind, this thin plate of a man flaps back and forth slightly. Featureless, inscrutable, yet vulnerable, he seems caught in mid-journey, utterly alone.
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Before 1983 von der Goltz was making realistic three-dimensional figures, trying to express individual psychology through sculptural form. He was also asking himself basic questions–“What is truth? What is real?”–and reading Sartre and Camus. He started making silhouettes after a visit to Italy, where he was struck by the silhouettes of Renaissance sculptures on buildings in Florence and Siena against the evening sky–“a neutral background without any measure. I thought, Oh, that’s it.” He’s since placed his own figures on many European buildings; one graced the Berlin Wall before it came down.
In two other “Balance” pieces the rod emerging from the wall is curved; these rods twist back on themselves, reversing direction more than once, suggesting an unpredictable and complex journey. Corner Installation (#9231) is just four metal rods linking two perpendicular walls, with a figure balanced on one of them; but each rod is a different length and thickness and crosses the corner at a different angle, making the space seem alive with possibilities. The rods’ direct connection to the walls makes the pathways they represent seem to emanate from the architecture of the room, suggesting that journeys are part of the general condition of things–just as the figure could be anyone.
Levy’s work is equally playful and bleak. The identical figures evoke commodified, mass-manufactured baubles. And Levy’s heaps of bodies are just as alone as von der Goltz’s solitary figures–more alone in a way because, lost in a crowd, they seem to be offered no alternatives, no freedom. Instead they’re imprisoned in endless cycles of repetition. The floor-to-ceiling Shower consists of 12 strings of 11 nude figures each, hanging upside down and facing in various directions; only rarely do they face each other. In Walkers two concentric circles of nudes, the outer male and the inner female, march in single file in opposite directions, never touching.
Levy grew up in Chicago, where her parents have an injection-mold plastic business in their home, producing things like cereal-box toys. Levy’s day job now is as a freelance pattern maker for mass-produced plastic–“I’ve done Bugs Bunny and Fred Flintstone.” But issues of mass production are clearly present in this exhibit, which straddles the boundaries between high art and kitsch, between the handmade and the mass-produced; her molds are created from figures she shapes by hand. Trained in fine art, she speaks of her work in terms of gender relations and group dynamics but admits to being “highly invested in traditional figurative sculpture.”
