“Do not sit on the art!” is something you don’t hear very often at contemporary art shows, making Ina Weber’s new solo exhibition Architectures, Memories, Utopias at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee an exception. The confusion of some attendees (at least three on Sunday afternoon) is understandable: Weber makes sly, playful sculptures that mimic the ordinary objects and mundane buildings of the modern city. Consequently the red bench, one of a cluster of objects that make up the show’s first work Fußgängerzone (“Pedestrian Zone”), could easily be mistaken for, well – a red bench. Upon a closer look the artifice becomes apparent, but the object-imitations hew close enough to the originals to provoke our normal reactions to such objects, confounding in their similarity.
Weber is adroit in small acts of deception (a skill she might have picked up from the Martin Kippenberger, who taught her at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel). In one room of the exhibition, 13 small sculptures of ceramic and concrete depict unassuming buildings in Berlin and beyond: a Chinese restaurant, a department store, a Mietskaserne, a post-war apartment block. Sitting in two rows directly on the floor, at the mercy of wandering toddlers, the diminutive models cut a sharp contrast to the oversized and ungainly sculptures on display elsewhere in the show. These distortions of scale and proportion in Weber’s work are disconcerting. Something is off here, but what exactly, is hard to say.
Continue text by Jesse Coburn HERE
Image above: The service isn’t great. Mix Café (2011). (Photo: Bernd Borchardt, Courtesy of Ina Weber)
WANDERLUST 