Christiane Löhr
- in the room - Objects and drawings - May 25 until July 06, 2019

 

We are looking forward to the fourth solo exhibition with new drawings and objects placed in the gallery space by Christiane Löhr.

Christiane Löhr has developed a broad sculptural and graphic oeuvre in more than twenty years of her artistic work. Löhr studied in the 90s at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Jannis Kounellis, the important co-founder of the Arte Povera movement who died two years ago. Even before this time, the artist had intuitively made the decision to use exclusively natural materials as the artistic language for her objects.

"The fact that I work with materials from nature does not mean that I work about nature. I am guided by the classical questions of sculpture such as proportion, volume, tension, balance, emptiness, abundance, fragility, stability".

For Löhr, the making of a sculpture by assembling found plant parts such as blades of grass or seeds, for example, usually following the laws of construction and geometry, is just as important as its placement in the surrounding space.

"I am interested in how something behaves in space. Space plays a major role
in my work. It's not that they displace space, rather they enclose space, space flows through them and space is condensed."

In the gallery exhibition a seed cloud on the ceiling and a group of objects placed in a specific constellation are presented. In addition, drawings from the small (27 x 20 cm) to the very large format (153 x 196 cm) are shown.

Löhr also explores space in her drawings. Using lines of pencil or oil pastel, she divides the space and discovers the resulting surfaces and their different light intensities.

"The minimal things are totally important. The lines open and close the space. They may have something of a personality."

Christiane Löhr was born in Wiesbaden in 1965. She lives and works in Cologne (DE) and Prato (IT). Her works are shown in museums and galleries in Germany and abroad; her works are particularly strongly represented in Italy, Greece, the USA and Japan. In 2001 she took part in the exhibition "Plateau of Humanity" curated by Harald Szeeman at the 49th Venice Biennale. In spring 2018, at the invitation of Tony Cragg, she showed a selection of her filigree sculptures in the monumental hall of the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden in Wuppertal. Until mid-July, the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen is showing sculptures by Christiane Löhr, and in mid-May a room installed by her was opened in the Gallerie delle Prigioni of the Fondazione Benetton in Treviso, Italy.

Quotations: Christiane Löhr in conversation with Kerstin Stremmel, 2018, and Jens Peter Koerver, 2019

Photos: David Ertl