Gereon Krebber Somatös

Galerie Christian Lethert is delighted to present its 3rd solo exhibition with Cologne based sculptor Gereon Krebber (*1973). Somatös is a word formation that mixes the idea of the somatic (physiological) and comatose. This state of uncertainty is the basic idea of the exhibition: inscrutable material, form, surface and appearance.

For the Greek natural philosophers, similar to the hylozoists of the 17th century, life was a quality of matter itself. The world is soaked with life and obviously dead appearing things can be alive. Immanuel Kant judged: »The hylozoism inspirits everything, the materialism however kills everything.« Krebber talks about his sculptures as the ›un-dead‹ that seem to get out of control make us look like the sorcerer’s apprentice. In the first gallery room Krebber presents two works from the series Polycurls. These works, made of polyurethane (spray foam) and colored spray paint, are finally coated with epoxy casting resin: »With a gun I spray foam into thin, curling and winding threads that lay on top and next to each other. The view gets lost in a porous swarm that gives the impression of a freely winding and frizzing mass.«
Krebber sprays his sculptures into shutter moulds that build solid blocks and bodies. Some parts he completes and shapes free hand by piling strands and threads of polyurethane foam which hang down straggly, agglomerate and break out of its forms. The monochrome chatoyant colored bodies appear alive and organic but stay abstract and unfamiliar. The works are coated with dropping layers of epoxy resin that enclose the sculpture like clammy slime.
»Captcha« is a dark and blue-green gleaming crater. A wormy mass flows out of its ring mould that opens on one side. The flat block »Payback« tilts to one side and has a beige-brown-fleshly color. The sculptures show a precarious moment of loss of control, tilting and overflow. Gereon Krebber’s recent sculptures reside in the realm between fascination and disgust, between creature and object, animation and concretion, slapstick and threat. The same with the work in the second room of the gallery: a multi-part floor work of cellulose and concrete. Egg-like, organic forms build a strange breeding place resembling the hatchery in the space shuttle of the movie Alien. »The objects seem to lurk beneath the surface: There is still something strange, creepy and indescribable in the omitted empty spaces that lets it pound.« (Viola Weigel)