Andreas Grimm and Adrian Rosenfeld are pleased to announce the first US exhibition of the work of Düsseldorf-based artist, Felix Schramm. Comber is an installation using wood, drywall, paint and other materials which completely transforms the Grimm|Rosenfeld NY gallery, and continues the artist's focus on the psychological effects of the transmutation of space.
Richard Henry Dana coined the term “comber” in his 1840 narrative of a sailing voyage to California when he wrote, “The heavy swell of the Pacific was...breaking in loud and high combers upon the beach”. This idea of the continuous bursting force of long waves, and the moments before waves crest, provides the departure point for Felix Schramm’s site-specific work at Grimm|Rosenfeld, New York.
Schramm changes the gallery, first by installing a completely new ground and ceiling in the entire exhibition space. The slope in ceiling and floor strip the familiar "white cube" of its reliable reference points. Inside the space, the viewer is surrounded by buckling, breaking and falling forms, bursting through the ceiling and ground. These forms seem to tenuously balance themselves on tiny points, and the apparent violence with which the structures have been made gives way to surprising vistas, shifting light and the touch with which Schramm aligns edges, balances mass and resolves line and color.
Much of the formal inspiration for Schramm's work comes from public and institutional architecture. By breaking apart archetypal versions of these spaces, as well as the specific locations in which he creates his installations, Schramm exposes a multiplicity of tensions in experience: between architectonic shapes and the negative space created by them, between new, builder's-grade materials and the used and found materials that he sometimes employs, between construction and destruction, meditation and violence, the impulse to build and the inertia of gravity. Although his interventions are very carefully composed, the roughness of the materials, the jarring angles and the uncomfortable spatial incursions often seem to be the result of some terrible disaster, as if the room had opened up just long enough to accept some falling wreckage--only to close again.
Schramm says that with his work he wants to create an "un-thing", an unseen thing, a kind of rediscovered state where spatial and emotional responses merge. For a recent exhibition at Ausstellungsraum 25 in Zürich, Schramm imbedded a turntable into one of his constructions. On the record player was an old disc of German children's songs with the hole re-drilled 2cm off-center. The result was an elliptical orbit and a very particular rhythm of distortions and melody, which evoke larger rhythms: form, light, habit and time. The way this piece addresses the spectator points out one of Schramm's central concerns. His extreme spaces, situated at the convergence of many borders, are a way to explore the psychological choreography of habitation: "the most interesting human behavior occurs at these extreme points."
The exhibition will be on view through January 7th. For further information or photographs please contact Nathan Heiges at 212-352-2388. The gallery is located at 530 West 25th Street, 3rd Floor and open Tuesday through Saturday 10am-6pm.
