Gerwald Rockenschaub: Bend it

In his ninth solo exhibition in the Galerie Eva Presenhuber Gerwald Rockenschaub is showing a new group of works: under the title bend it, Rockenschaub has assembled recent wall pieces made of overlapping sheets of plexiglass. The artist has combined these works with painted surfaces in an installation one can enter, in which the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality are blurred.

Rockenschaub’s recent plexiglass wall pieces are unlike early works from this group in one essential point: heretofore the artist affixed the sheets, some transparent, some opaque, directly onto the wall, as in a monumental installation in the Galerie Paul Maenz in 1989. He now layers them. In addition, he cuts them into irregularly angled or playfully biomorphic shapes or riddles them with holes. As a result, the colors of the sheets blend into new shades, producing multiple visual overlappings and clashes.

As always in his plexiglass works, Rockenschaub is concerned with the interplay between presence and absence, making visible and concealing. For the artist generally uses transparent sheets that are very thin, so that seen from a distance they cannot be distinguished from a painted surface. In bend it Rockenschaub heightens this effect by combining his objects with actual geometric wall paintings. In this combination the eye scarcely perceives the two mediums—painting and relief—as different.

Also characteristic of Rockenschaub’s exhibitions is the fact that the artist involves himself in the way the presentation responds to the site’s architectural features. Thus bend it responds to the tubelike space of Galerie Eva Presenhuber in that Rockenschaub has placed the plexiglass works on the opposing long walls. On the one side are color works and wall surfaces. Across from them the artist has mounted twelve white, rectangular plexiglass sheets of identical size against a background that has also been painted white. Eleven of the sheets are arranged in an alternating rhythm of vertical and horizontal: one element diverges from this pattern in that it was tipped in order to fill the entire length of the wall with the plexiglass sheets. The separation of colored and colorless surfaces heightens the optical confusion, for the white plexiglas sheets blend into the wall more than their richly contrasted counterparts.