»Kompartimento« is the title of Gereon Krebber’s exhibition, which was preceded by an intensive and critical examination of materials. The artistic will to experiment is juxtaposed with a rapid change in perception. Revision is followed by transformation, and the sculptor is now exhibiting the results of this crisis management and reassessment over two floors at Galerie Christian Lethert.
Upon entering the gallery, the artist immediately confronts you with a bronze hanging in the air. »Und überhaupt (Aureturn #1)«, 2013/24, looks like a massive, hardened drop, whose installation at a clear height causes a certain amount of anxiety.
Gereon Krebber has positioned the large-format floor sculpture »Alle Pronomen«, 2024, consisting of many individual modules, in the middle of the room. Various materials such as plywood, wax or concrete are embedded in the metal frames as substitutes. Like a collection of material samples in a database that the artist has saved in order to arm himself for the future.
Behind it, »Jicksticks« lean against the wall, grass-green poles made of sanded plywood, some of them three meters high, which taper downwards and confront their opponents with a hard edge. Are they sticks, spears or tools of the artist and do they even invite participation? They emanate a disturbing ambivalence that is also reflected in the work on the opposite wall. Morbid shapes soaked in slime and paint drip from a railing that has been fixed flat to the wall and robbed of its original function.
In the lower room, further versions of the hanging bronze objects can be seen, but this time at eye level. On the wall, Gereon Krebber has placed several ceramics from the Kompartimento series in a frieze. Shrouded in dark, sombre colors or glazed in a riot of color, the grid-shaped, sculptural fragments seem to preserve stories from the past, when they were still part of a whole.
As the term ›transformation‹ implies, it is a matter of ›transforming/reshaping‹, nothing genuinely new is created that is not connected to something that already exists. In the works of Gereon Krebber, transformational processes lead to uncompromising reinterpretations.
