Hermann Wittenberg On show in Cape Town
If you’ve recently seen too many clever installations, provocative experimental exhibitions or deeply relevant conceptual art, take a look at Till Mayer’s remarkable sculptural works at Cape Town’s Mau Mau Gallery.
Vital Functions is an exhibition of wooden sculptures which not only display an unusual technical virtuosity but are also strikingly beautiful. The pieces are above all tactile: they ask to be touched, stroked, picked up and weighed in the hands.
Mayer does breathtaking things with wood. Always only using a single large block for each sculpture, he pushes the possiblities of a notoriously difficult medium to the limit. In a weirdly titled piece called Van Gogh’s Ear, a huge mahogany block is reduced to the intricately twisting, sinuous flow of delicate forms. Here, as in several other pieces, the massive solidity of the wooden block is opened up, thereby creating an interplay between the surface of the material and its interior spaces.
Most of the sculptures reflect an intriguing tension between, on the one side, solidity and volume, and on the other, hollowness and interiority. For example in Life Span, a piece fashioned out of blackwood, the entire centre has been hollowed out, leaving finely polished wooden ribs enclosing an interior space. Similarly in Inner Tree, the hollowing out produces not only gaps and holes but extends the outer surfaces into the centre.
On the other hand, pieces such as Mouthpiece or Butterfly’s Birth appear completely solid, with only the titles hinting at an unseen interiority. This theme can also be seen in the Basic Objects, a collection of smaller hand-sized pieces scattered across the gallery floor like driftwood. At first glance they look solid, but contain hidden spaces filled with nuts, bobs and bits. Pick them up, and you find out that each one is a rattle with its own distinctive sound.
None of the sculptures represent recognizable human figures or natural shapes, but you can find subtle hints of various life forms. Elements such as curves, hollows, domes and spheres constitute an underlying organic sculptural register, underscored by titles such as Procreation and Symbiosis.
The sculptures are interspersed with a series of charcoal and pencil drawings. You’d be forgiven for wondering if they were by the same artist, as they don’t mesh easily with the wood. An exception is a series of 20 smaller photocopied pencil drawings. As with the sculptures, they play with depth and perspective, and out of the interplay of jagged lines emerge hints of various organic forms.
In case you’re wondering about the photocopies, Mayer thinks that they actually improve the originals. For those people discomforted by the notion of simulacral art, he has included the originals inside the clipframes.
Mayer has had a varied career. He studied fine art as well as architecture in Berlin and has practised as an architect and as a free-lance sculptor. In the past he has worked extensively with marble in Carrara, but his present obsession with wood owes more to Africa than to Italy. He spent more than a year travelling the continent and, although disappointed with the touristy quality of much contemporary wood sculpture, was profoundly influenced by the astonishing wood-craft techniques of African artists. “Everything possible in the medium,” he claims, “has already been done in Africa.”
In the past, he preferred the predictability of stone and was irritated with wood as a sculptural medium: a crack, hole or knot would appear in the wrong place and disturb the overall design. His present work shows that he no longer regards these features as problems but as strengths which, if skillfully integrated, can become the focal point of the piece.
“If something tears and breaks,” he believes, “it usually improves the final form, it gives it complexity. You’ve got to take your knothole and use it in such a way that it becomes essential.”