Robert Huber (artist)

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State Russian Museum , Saint Petersburg , August 12, 2010, video installation “HEAVEN” during the opening of the exhibition “The Sky in Art”

Robert Huber (* 1955 in Augsburg ) is a German artist. In his work he examines natural phenomena and the shifting of the limits of visual perceptibility .

Life

Inspired by woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer , he began to draw at the age of 8 and from then on developed his artistic talent autodidactically. In the mid-1970s he met Arik Brauer , who suggested a scholarship to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . But, impressed by the appearance of several emissaries from the Lakota Indians at the University of Cologne, he set off on a six-month journey across North America . He lives in the wilderness of secluded reservations with Oglala- Lacota in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and later with spiritual guides the Blackfoot in Glacier National Park in northern Montana. His direct experiences during numerous ritual activities such as Inipi , the sun dance and healing rituals away from civilization, become for him sustainable research content and have a formative influence on his later work.

Works

Huber's position of constantly questioning the supposed limits of perception is particularly expressed in his project “Mobile Plastic for Visionary Development”. It is about overcoming these limits as well as dissolving the localizability of the work of art. The installation is no longer the work, but the place where the work is created, namely through the participation of the public, who acts according to the artist's instructions. Through concentrated but unfocused seeing, another dimension of visual perceptibility can be developed collectively. The object can still be visually recognized by people, but cannot be conclusively determined analytically due to its immaterial nature. It emerges in the experience content and the statements of the perceiving participants. This data is collected and documented. This creates both a new hermeneutical context and an expansion of the term empiricism .

In years of meticulous series of experiments, Robert Huber investigates phenomena of the self-organization of matter in order to illustrate the most subtle processes. Using unusual imaging processes, he allows the iconographic properties of plants to appear in the area of ​​contact between materiality and immateriality . A crystalline medium dissolved in water and red wine create images in the liquid that are reminiscent of grapevines. During evaporation, the inorganic microcrystals under the influence of the vital formative power of the red wine experience a new order that is not inherent in them. What remains are enigmatic images of organic plant structures: “Greenhouse, 2006”. Since 2008 Huber has been working on the concept of a film documentation of these phenomena, which is to be installed with the walk-in plastic “Carbon Shelter” for collective awareness training in public.

With his “Progressive Mutable Installations”, he places industrially manufactured mass-produced goods such as pieces of furniture, building materials or packaging material in a spatial context with the morphology of various salts and their growth. The constantly changing spatial situation in its physical complexity cannot be fully sensed by the viewer, nor could it be created by the artist himself without the inclusion of morphological self-organization. Huber thus also points to the limits of what art can be realized.

Quotes

"Resisting the convenience of collective agreement about what, or what cannot be perceived, is the epicenter of my work."

"If it is true that humanity is on the beach of the ocean of its own consciousness, then art should be able to keep your feet wet."

“You can only defend yourself against the all-defining influence of anthropocentric viewing habits by creating alternatives with art and thus reclaiming the occupied space. So much for my strategy. "

literature

  • Nina Oxenius in conversation with Robert Huber: Creating spaces for the unknown. In: Art Time. 1/2002, printing and publishing company Dieter Schuffelen GmbH, Cologne.
  • Robert Huber: Crysalt. Siering GmbH & Co.KG publishing house, Bonn 2006, ISBN 978-3-9231-5434-0 .
  • The Sky in Art. Palace Editions, 2010, ISBN 978-3-9407-6181-1 . (Exhibition catalog of a group exhibition in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Huber, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH augsburg