I have been devising decentralised sculptures since my first of that kind in 1956. Reducing the individual forms to a minimum (cubes, discs or columns) set up areas of tension. By compression or scattering, these attained considerable dimensions. The primary interest for me was the gravitational relationship between the forms, not their individual weight pressing down on the ground. That decision released me from the need to consider the sculpture as having front and side views. What was decisive now was the place a work was set in and its relation to the surrounding space. In 1961, sculptures came about with metal planes, unhampered by a pedestal, so they penetrated the space; in 1962, there were closed and open interior spaces; in 1965, decentralised sculptures flush with the ground; in 1972, volumes that pushed back the ambient space. From 1993 on, I made large forms in which the outside surfaces reveal the thinness of the material. Subsequent works define the opened inner space by differing radial axes. This generates a fluctuation between the interior and the space around.
Erich Reusch |