KARSTEN KONRAD

“In its language of form and material, Karsten Konrad’s work refers to the semantics of a man-made throwaway society which, however, is increasingly ridding itself of immediate human presence. Karsten Konrad’s work, to be sure, is marked by a distinctive feel for surfaces and textures, for the peculiarities and effects of the analogue, and for the human relationship between viewer, sculpture and surrounding space.”

“Karsten Konrad is a master of circular thinking. His artistic strategy essentially consists in giving new recognition and meaning to the seemingly useless – that is, in adding and combining what already exists into new arrangements. He shows assemblages and montages that are the result of experimenting with stocks of forms and with a system of rules by which visual building blocks in art and design are structured and understood.”

“When Konrad works, he does not follow an idea cranked out of the brain box, but lets himself be guided by the material, its specific nature, its elegance, its momentum. The artist perceives what this inner substance whispers to him, and so he lets himself be stimulated in the working process and drawn on towards a point he could not even have guessed at the beginning. In this process he reshapes fragments, takes them apart, assembles and rebuilds them, and brings into view things that only gain their radiance through combining what was not known in advance.”

“When the art historian Christian Malycha asked him, ‘Do your sculptures represent anything?’, Konrad replied in 2012: ‘They represent nothing except the working principle. Their made-ness – that is what they have to stand for.’ There is nothing to add to that.”

“My conclusion: Karsten Konrad finds brilliant, stylish solutions without any effort. Like one of those acrobats of whom Rilke speaks so sceptically in his elegy, he keeps many plates spinning on a whirling rod, and none of them shatters, and everything is a successful arrangement, art at its most light-hearted.”

Photos: Bernd Borchardt