Michael Seeling
Michael Seeling (* 1958 in Wuppertal ) is a German sculptor .
Life
Michael Seeling initially completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason and stone sculptor from 1977 to 1980 . Between 1984 and 1990 he then studied fine arts at the Kassel University of Applied Sciences (GhK), where he passed his exams in 1990 with Friedrich Salzmann and Harry Kramer . In 1992 he was awarded the Volker Hinniger Prize of the City of Bamberg , and in 1996 the Art Prize of the Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal . In 1997 Michael Seeling gave guest lectures at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Bergische Universität Wuppertal . From 2005 to 2014 he had a teaching position for sculpture and interdisciplinary work at the Free Academy of Fine Arts (fadbk) Essen, to whose establishment and further development to the University of Fine Arts Essen (HDBK) he made a significant contribution.
Michael Seeling is a member of the German Association of Artists . He lives and works in Wuppertal and Düsseldorf .
plant
The starting point of Michael Seeling's work is to derive sculptural action from civilizational and cultural processes. His works emerge as »still images« from sequences of these processes. In the sculptural realization, these sections condense into a condensate and monumentalize themselves through the methods used in the respective material used. The combination of various singular works results in extensive network of relationships.
The artist's oeuvre can be divided into the following groups of works:
Tensional stone carving
Michael Seeling gained first notoriety in the early 1990s through his tensional stone carving, which he had already developed during his studies at the end of the 1980s - which the artist simply dubbed "bending work". Here he dealt with the physical properties and limits of natural stone in order to derive design principles for his sculptures .
Using the elasticity or resilience of the stone, physical-causal systems of relationships are constructed in which inherent and external forces act on the material. Thin strips of stone are put under tension and bent. Stone blocks or slabs are cut into almost their entire length, so that they only give the resulting pieces a minimum of cohesion at one end. In the case of correspondingly thin sections, gravity is in principle sufficient to cause the stone to deform as a visible indication of the forces acting. The tensional stone sculpture Michael Seelings shows the viewer a flexibility and dynamism of the classic material stone, which he would never have thought possible based on his everyday experience.
To understand the design principle, relations systems as sculpture, from purely physical also extend to cultural processes, Michael Seeling turned in the 2000s more the figurative to. Based on the observation of nature, it became increasingly important to him to anchor the sculpture in human everyday life in order to break its orthodox borders.
Gold pieces
In the case of gold pieces, the combination of the two extremely contrasting materials gold and styrofoam confronts the logics of goods and value systems. Whereby the artist defines their commonality in the respective ambivalence of the materials.
The gold pieces are sculptures made of styrofoam molded parts (transport packaging for fragile goods for mass consumption). These bodies, constructed by industry only according to functional, not aesthetic points of view, are ironically gilded by the artist with the greatest meticulousness. The application of gold leaf ennobles the purely functionally designed styrofoam containers by revealing their originally unintended, but nonetheless existing aesthetic qualities. At the same time, according to their original function, the sculptural bodies created in this way are also negative forms of the previously enclosed consumer item. They are therefore "form" in a double sense, once as independent aesthetic artefacts and at the same time as functional "form" (casting form / molding), as used in the classic sculptural process of art casting .
In the context of the presentation, the Styrofoam molded parts transformed into sculptures form a completely new class of objects, whereby the aesthetic qualities replace the economic-functional ones. The bases placed under the gold pieces are to be understood as part of the sculpture, but - as a reminiscence of the original purpose of the styrofoam molded parts - themselves are only of a purely functional character.
“The sculptor arranges and enlivens the space, gives it meaning. In my opinion, order and meaning must correspond to our time and its special spirit. "
Plantings
In the planting group of works , analogous to the gold pieces , a transformation into a sculptural artefact takes place. The starting point for this transformation, however, is not a functional-technical construct, but the living natural object ( cactus ).
The sculptural quality that the artist as well as the recipients of the cacti recognized from the outset is consciously used and particularly evident in the exhibition context. In the plantations , the cacti appear as autonomous sculptures, which are on an equal footing with the viewer by being presented to him almost at eye level. Detached from their natural habitat , they acted in the exhibition as a link between the art world and nature ( environment ). In combination with the matricular drawings (see next subchapter), they are also anchor points of the network of relationships that extends even further through the drawings and extends in the physical as well as in the subjective perceptual space of the viewer.
The historical context, the referring character of the cactus plants, is constitutive for the subjective reference system of the viewer. With the selection of this plant genus, Michael Seeling alludes to contemporary ( colonialist , imperialist ) backgrounds, which also indicates the increasingly conceptual character of his works. Naturally, cacti are only found on the American continent. Through their transfer into other contexts of being - such as transplanting, breeding, botanical cataloging or domestication - they become witnesses of European strategies of appropriation.
Matricular drawings
The matrikularen drawings show, seen from a certain distance, illustrations of specific phenomena. The objects of the drawings are: plant portraits (cacti from the artist's collection), supernovae (based on photographs of space telescopes and as the origin of the element gold) as well as gold mines and penal camps (as places of gold extraction and the exploitation of humans and nature).
Seen up close, the drawings reveal the tabular structure of a matrix . The image carrier is unprinted drawing paper, in whose imaginary grid (as if it were checked calculation paper) hatching with an inclination angle of 45 ° is drawn with a pencil. By using different pencil thicknesses, the brightness gradation of the gray values between the individual hatchings (pixels) is varied. The inclined hatching corresponds to the gesture of writing, but the continued punctual action of the chisel on the stone can also be associated with them.
The conceptuality of matrikularen drawings or their degree of abstraction is made more acute when the subject of the type area represent a scientific or journalistic texts, which in turn come from the themes Kakteenkunde, gold, astronomy, etc. imperialism. The underlying articles cannot be »read« either at close range or from a great distance. The applied drawing technique of the hatched grid focuses entirely on the proportional, purely visual representation of the type area shown. What is evoked is an impression of the texts that a viewer would get with an extremely blurred view or that someone would have who did not even have the possessive cultural technique of reading.
In combination with the gold pieces and plantings , reference systems that go beyond the individual works are created. These networks of relationships are both spatial and thematic. In more recent drawings, the themes increasingly detach themselves from those of the sculptures and plantings and are expanded to include a variety of other subjects . The matricular drawings then refer to the sculptural objects on a structural, aesthetic and sensual level.
Exhibitions (selection)
Solo exhibitions
- 1991: Stone tensioning , studio-gallery collective, Wuppertal
- 1992: Splitting , rooms for new art - Rolf Hengesbach, Wuppertal
- 1994: Michael Seeling - Sculptures , Museum Abteiberg , Mönchengladbach (catalog)
- 1995: Michael Seeling , Rooms for New Art - Rolf Hengesbach, Wuppertal
- 1999: Interspace , Kunsthalle Göppingen (catalog)
- 1999: Interspace , Kunstverein Bochum (catalog)
- 1999: Michael Seeling , Rooms for New Art - Rolf Hengesbach, Wuppertal
- 2003: Michael Seeling , Rooms for New Art - Rolf Hengesbach, Wuppertal
- 2003: Homing , Galerie Rolf Hengesbach, Cologne
- 2007: »gistreuui« , Gallery KU 28, Essen (catalog)
- 2012: Raumgedicht , Glashaus Worringer Platz , Düsseldorf
- 2013: Gold pieces, plantings, drawings , Hengesbach art space, Wuppertal
- 2014: A piazza for everything and everyone in its piazza , Museum of non-representational art (MgK), Otterndorf (catalog)
- 2016: Nicola Schrudde / Michael Seeling - viriditate , Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal
Group exhibitions
- 1987: documenta forum , Kassel
- 1987: Kunstverein Eisenturm Mainz (KEM)
- 1990: Exhibition / installation , Kunsthalle Barmen , Wuppertal
- 1990: Gießhaus, Kassel
- 1991: Hall K18, Kassel
- 1992: Stadtgalerie Bamberg - Villa Dessauer (with the artist group INFuG / DAS INSTITUT), Bamberg
- 1993: Ibbenbüren sandstone symposium
- 1994: Art Museum Yaroslavl (with U. Schröder, A. Schwietzke, J. Zähringer), Yaroslavl (Russia)
- 1996: Coslart , Centro Cultural Margarita Nelken, Madrid
- 2002: 100 years Von der Heydt-Museum , Kunsthalle Barmen , Wuppertal
- 2003: Participation in Art Basel
- 2012: 20 Years Hengesbach Gallery , Hengesbach Gallery, Berlin
- 2012: The own and the other in photography - An exhibition for Hannah Höch , project space of the German Association of Artists , Berlin
- 2015: Avant La Devantgarde , Ackerloft, PADE Kunstverein eV, Düsseldorf
- 2015: private view 2 , Städtische Galerie, Villingen-Schwenningen (catalog)
- 2016: In front of the sculpture - sculptural drawings (with Tina Haase , Karin Hochstatter , Birgit Werres ), Ulrich Mueller Gallery, Cologne
literature
- Gottfried Böhm : A Copernican turn of the gaze , in: Michael Seeling - Interspace , Kunsthalle Göppingen , Göppingen, 1999, ISBN 3-927791-35-0
- Bernd Finkeldey: Look out! , in: Michael Seeling - Interspace , Kunsthalle Göppingen , Göppingen, 1999, ISBN 3-927791-35-0
- Markus Fuhrmeister: Transformation of Styrofoam , in: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) from May 9, 2007, Essen
- Frauke Heidtmann: Styrofoam is becoming a gold currency , in: Nordsee-Zeitung (NZ) from February 4, 2014, Bremerhaven
- Rolf Hengesbach: Conversations with Michael Seeling , in: Michael Seeling - Pseudomorphose , Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal, Wuppertal, 1997
- Hannelore Kersting: Constructive Tensions , in: Michael Seeling - Sculptures , Museum Abteiberg , Mönchengladbach, 1994, ISBN 3-924039-29-1
- Hannelore Kersting: The discomfort with arbitrariness , in: Michael Seeling - Pseudomorphose , Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal, Wuppertal, 1997
- Wouter Kotte (text), in: exhibition / installation , Kunsthalle Barmen , Wuppertal, 1990
- Karl Neuffer: Flexions and Reflections , in: Michael Seeling - "gistreuui" , Dahlemer Verlags-Anstalt / fadbk, Berlin / Essen, 2007, ISBN 978-3-928832-70-0
- Ulrike Schick: Searching for traces , in: Michael Seeling - A piazza for everything and everything on its piazza , Museum of Object- Free Art (MgK), Otterndorf, 2014
- Municipal Gallery Villingen-Schwenningen (Ed.): Private view 2 , City of Villingen-Schwenningen, Villingen-Schwenningen, 2015, ISBN 978-3-939423-52-2
- Andreas Steffens: Das Sein der Kunst , in: Michael Seeling - Pseudomorphose , Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal, Wuppertal, 1997
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Seeling, Michael in the directory of members on the website of the German Association of Artists , accessed on November 19, 2015.
- ↑ Biographical data: Michael Seeling - Info ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the artist's website, accessed September 14, 2015.
- ↑ Tensionale stone carving : conceptual formation in the present article. Derived from "tension" (Latin), "tensional" (adj.) In the sense of: "exhibiting tension or pressure, exposed to it, working with it".
- ^ Matricular drawing : conceptual reorganization in the context of this article. Derived from »matrix« (Latin), »matrikular« (adj.) In the sense of: »in the form or shape of a matrix, showing its structure«.
- ↑ Exhibition directory: Michael Seeling - Info ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the artist's website, accessed February 4, 2016.
- ↑ Exhibition directory: Michael Seeling - Info ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the artist's website, accessed September 14, 2015.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Seeling, Michael |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German sculptor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1958 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wuppertal |