​​

​

​

​

​

To approach an artwork, many look at the small label first, which indicates facts like a title or a year of making. Technique and measurements are then presented in a catalogue. Those dimensions, in the sense of size – so height x width x depth – are a real help with, for instance, placing oneself in relation to a piece. But that is just the start of contemplating an artwork. Its real dimensions are different ones, the ones that cannot be captured in either numbers or words, which we can approximate at best and which form the essence of the piece.

​

The exhibition “Dimensionen” in PORT25 – Raum für Gegenwartskunst brings together six artistic positions which are concerned with sculpture, statuary art, object art, but also painting. The materials are clay, stone, cardboard, metal, glass, and mixed media. Traditional sculpture is represented by Tom Feritsch, Jens Trimpin and Matthias Will. Katharina Weidauer’s glass objects, Torsten Mühlbach’s glittering societal criticism and Herbert Warmuth’s incidental wall-paintings continue the theme.

Matthias Will works in (stainless) steel, starting out from geometric structures such as angle, circle or ellipse. The seemingly heavy objects are tensioned using thin steel ropes; the result is a floating state in which the void between the shapes becomes a defined space.

This apparent contradiction also comes to light upon contemplation of the massive blocks by Mannheim-based sculptor Jens Trimpin. Their surfaces are slightly tilted, fractionally bent; they thus lose their mooring, tip into a precarious balance and yet they are obviously – heavy. Jens Trimpin’s stones are compaction into a concentrate of form.

And Tom Feritsch, too, often has basic stereometric shapes as his starting-point. In terracotta he moulds, for example, grid structures or bizarre intrinsically organic shapes that recall utopian architectural designs. When firing the shapes, Feritsch also allows for chance in the creation process. That is a factor that likewise plays a role in Katharina Weidauer’s blown glass objects. With Weidauer, contrast-uniting glass, which, according to state, be solid or liquid, cool or hot, takes on fantastic, vegetal or maritime-looking shapes. In bright light they show themselves in radiant colours; in the darkness, in a mysterious gleam that comes from special pigments.

Torsten Mühlbach’s statuary art installations, due to their glittering disco aesthetic, have a cheering effect at first glance. However, recognition of some ironically acerbic societal criticism is then immediate. The bottomless depths of our consumerist behaviour, which result in inequalities at all levels, assault our vision here.

The works of Herbert Warmuth, finally, are situated somewhere between painting and sculptural intervention: here and there, pharmaceutical packaging hangs in the space, the graphic design of which Warmuth continues on the wall by making coloured lines or blocky colour fields. The boundaries of work and space are not always instantly definable here.

​

Dimensions of space and time are relatively abstract concepts; we can barely grasp them, and then the question arises of how many dimensions there actually are in art; certainly more than height x width x depth plus time. To explore them, we should take a little while to move in the space in front of and around the works.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​