Rosi Steinbach: Wild Nature
18 November 2017—6 January 2018
»Wild Nature« – these are people, animals and plants. An amazing selection and mixture of creatures that cannot be assigned to any specific culture, region or epoch. A randomness that gives pleasure to looking at. Each object starts anew and shows—like random notations from the encyclopaedia of the living—each creature with a context assigned to it by the artist.
The thin-walled ceramic objects, high-fired and glazed, take a traditional approach to the material. The malleable material follows the presented figure alone, no coincidence, no experimentally alienating handling. It almost seems like a playful, light-handed reproduction, on the border between decorative and artistic object. If it were not for the gallery space, where the exhibits are naturally exposed to association and demand interpretation in the ambivalence of essence and object, and if it were not for the distance-creating, high-gloss surface, which creates a distinguished cool aura of untouchability, which elevates and ennobles the figures and at the same time seems to conceal something. The unpretentious, realistic illustrations are then nevertheless sophisticated and immodest when it comes to the small, decisive added value that gives the reason to show them here.
The snakes, coiled into a ball, conceal whether they have come from the rainforest, the myth, as life savers or death bringers into the artwork. Two forest bustards, once intensively hunted in large colonies and today hardly to be found living free, actually present themselves in trophy manner and monkeys flirt with their human attributes; amusing, enigmatic, uncanny.
Two portraits, executed as tondi, stake out the manageable existence of the human being. One is Karl, a youthful face of the present—and the other is his counterpart, Ancestor, the recreated face of the oldest prehistoric man known to us. His fossil remains have just been surprisingly found in Jebel Irhoud* in Morocco, reconstructed into a figure by the artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis and translated into a portrait by Steinbach. The two tondi now span 300,000 years of human existence—much more than previously assumed—but still little in relation to the existence of animals.
Steinbach skilfully and guilelessly touches on this connection between coexistence and hierarchy: a man cautiously carries a rabbit. But the proportions are unusual—is the man too small for the animal or the animal too big for him? Who is right? And before whose scale? Likewise, it remains excitingly unsaid in the groups of figures who is leading, holding, dominating whom, or whether there is another authority that sorts, evaluates and relates the figures. It is possible that there is none at all—or every conceivable one.
The 300,000-year-old North African and the orangutan with the creative toy, the rabbit with the man, the woman with the goose and also Karl are equally sovereign and borrow each other's pose and behaviour—no judgement, no reproach. Rosi Steinbach's explorer's view of the creature has no moral filter. Steinbach is friendly towards her creatures and thus her objects succeed in posing the question of our relation to the Other beyond civilisation-theoretical discourses, in the midst of »Wild Nature«.
—By Tina Simon
______________
Dr. phil. Tina Simon
Author and publicist, Leipzig
*Researchers led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have examined fossils, including remains of a skull and mandible, that were discovered together with stone tools and other traces of human life - in a collapsed cave in Morocco. The researchers consider the bones to be 100,000 years older than anything that had previously been found of Homo sapiens fossils. Among experts, the find, which is currently being presented in the magazine "Nature", is considered a sensation. Because if this dating is correct, the birth of mankind must be backdated.
[DIE ZEIT, 07.06.2017]
The thin-walled ceramic objects, high-fired and glazed, take a traditional approach to the material. The malleable material follows the presented figure alone, no coincidence, no experimentally alienating handling. It almost seems like a playful, light-handed reproduction, on the border between decorative and artistic object. If it were not for the gallery space, where the exhibits are naturally exposed to association and demand interpretation in the ambivalence of essence and object, and if it were not for the distance-creating, high-gloss surface, which creates a distinguished cool aura of untouchability, which elevates and ennobles the figures and at the same time seems to conceal something. The unpretentious, realistic illustrations are then nevertheless sophisticated and immodest when it comes to the small, decisive added value that gives the reason to show them here.
The snakes, coiled into a ball, conceal whether they have come from the rainforest, the myth, as life savers or death bringers into the artwork. Two forest bustards, once intensively hunted in large colonies and today hardly to be found living free, actually present themselves in trophy manner and monkeys flirt with their human attributes; amusing, enigmatic, uncanny.
Two portraits, executed as tondi, stake out the manageable existence of the human being. One is Karl, a youthful face of the present—and the other is his counterpart, Ancestor, the recreated face of the oldest prehistoric man known to us. His fossil remains have just been surprisingly found in Jebel Irhoud* in Morocco, reconstructed into a figure by the artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis and translated into a portrait by Steinbach. The two tondi now span 300,000 years of human existence—much more than previously assumed—but still little in relation to the existence of animals.
Steinbach skilfully and guilelessly touches on this connection between coexistence and hierarchy: a man cautiously carries a rabbit. But the proportions are unusual—is the man too small for the animal or the animal too big for him? Who is right? And before whose scale? Likewise, it remains excitingly unsaid in the groups of figures who is leading, holding, dominating whom, or whether there is another authority that sorts, evaluates and relates the figures. It is possible that there is none at all—or every conceivable one.
The 300,000-year-old North African and the orangutan with the creative toy, the rabbit with the man, the woman with the goose and also Karl are equally sovereign and borrow each other's pose and behaviour—no judgement, no reproach. Rosi Steinbach's explorer's view of the creature has no moral filter. Steinbach is friendly towards her creatures and thus her objects succeed in posing the question of our relation to the Other beyond civilisation-theoretical discourses, in the midst of »Wild Nature«.
—By Tina Simon
______________
Dr. phil. Tina Simon
Author and publicist, Leipzig
*Researchers led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have examined fossils, including remains of a skull and mandible, that were discovered together with stone tools and other traces of human life - in a collapsed cave in Morocco. The researchers consider the bones to be 100,000 years older than anything that had previously been found of Homo sapiens fossils. Among experts, the find, which is currently being presented in the magazine "Nature", is considered a sensation. Because if this dating is correct, the birth of mankind must be backdated.
[DIE ZEIT, 07.06.2017]