UWE KARLSEN - Text - Sculptures

Materialisation – about the sculptures of Uwe Karlsen

“What matters is to follow the energy of a spatial vision that suddenly comes into your mind, to drop everything else and to start working; to surrender yourself to the flow of work that is beginning and not to evaluate or review it until later. What matters is to make room for intuition, to distance yourself from calculation, intellectual control over the new idea’s meaning and purpose, to adopt another standpoint. To follow an inner trail like a hunter in no man’s land, responding to the smallest signals, attracting and using everything in the surroundings that is necessary and possible for it.” Uwe Karlsen

Sculpture? Painting? In the history of art there have time and again been artists gifted in both these fundamental forms of expression who could not make up their mind to renounce one or the other. Starting with Degas, this phenomenon was of particular importance in the context of modern art. There were a series of modern painters who acquired knowledge through sculpture that was of significance for their painting. The painter-sculptors who immediately come to mind are Degas himself and the two outstanding giants, Picasso and Matisse – and also important figures like Joán Miró and Max Ernst. All five of these men were highly successful sculptors – in part (especially Picasso) because they fully exploited a certain “fools’ privilege” in their second medium, consequently finding new paths for sculpture as a whole. It is, on the other hand, more difficult to think of sculptors who fall into the little used category of sculptor-painter. The best example is perhaps Alberto Giacometti, who, while principally a sculptor, was also an exceptional painter. Indeed, in his late work his paintings are every bit as good as his sculptures.

Today the question of reconciling the two great arts of painting and sculpture seems less immediate. Many other modes of expression – installation and video, for instance – are currently available to young artists. Seen in this light, Uwe Karlsen’s persistent cultivation of both disciplines – sculpture and painting – almost seems purist. Which is his first vocation? Our spontaneous answer is that he is first and foremost a sculptor. Yet the questions to which he gets a response only through painting are so pressing that we are forced to say: he needs and is inspired by both.

In his canvases, Uwe Karlsen repeatedly evokes recognisable figurative elements that he transforms into painting. To some extent, this is also true of his sculptures, for example when he starts with the form of an erect bird whose physical mass he tightens and redesigns in his sculpture. Other figurative reminiscences can be found in his sculptures: these include the mountains that are so important to him, the lofty peaks of the world in which we live. Fish-like forms are also sometimes the point of departure for his works.

Yet Karlsen’s sculptures, even more than his paintings, are oriented on the destiny of pure form. References to figurative elements outside the work are present, but have a different weight. Unlike painting, sculpture is three-dimensional by definition and is therefore always an object that is actually present. Sculpture is always figurative – however abstract its behaviour may be. In Karlsen’s case, we could speak of objects through which the artist primarily explores form in the space of three-dimensional reality, alluding only secondarily to things that already exist.

Returning to the example of mountains (Monte Rosa), we see how a tectonic natural monument is taken as a point of departure for superimposing mighty panoramas of form - “four thousand meter-high peaks of perception” - the first ascent of which can become a challenge for every viewer.

But what does sculpture mean? – Last but not least, being multi-faceted. The sculptor’s job is to interpret and complete form in such a way that, from many different angles, it visualises exciting insights and new formations of the space that is shown and excised.

Excised? Since Henri Matisse at the latest, modern sculpture has always been the pure art of activating the vibrant nothingness that lies between materially present elements: in sculpture, bronze and co. encounter the spiritual, immaterial form of emptiness. Karlsen – following in Brancusi’s footsteps – sometimes explicitly thematises the multiple facets by positioning his sculptures so that they can be rotated. We are not necessarily required to walk around his works but, by slowly rotating them ourselves, can playfully trigger their changing interaction with the surrounding empty space.

Some of Karlsen’s works (for instance, Anfang und Ende II )are a filigrane creation of that duel with nothingness (and its exploration!), while in others (III- 94) he works with heavy volumes, which span the empty space as protective masses.

Vibration, a term that the artist himself uses to describe his work, is of key importance. The works – in their precise interplay with spherical shapes, with interruptions, organic abstraction – often thematise rhythms in space, which the sculptures seem to make visible as if they were waves in constant motion.

Karlsen’s sculptures can thus be seen as objects that give visible form to the many kinds of densified spatial, to some extent “archisculptural”, structures that are possible everywhere and which would never have been liberated from their camouflage without the hand of the artist.

What we find here is, as it were, a hidden grammar of space that has still to be explored. We find poetry of sheer organic form that the artist sees and perfectly transforms into materiality.

Uwe Karlsen’s paintings – in keeping with the most fundamental possibilities of this art – are surfaces onto which he projects what he sees in his mind whereas his sculptures interact with the visionary space in which they exist.

Dr. Philippe Büttner (Fondation Beyeler)