PRESS RELEASE
Manuela Leinhoß. Like a Human Being
January 18 – March 2, 2013
Pfingstweidstrasse 23 / Welti-Furrer Areal, 8005 Zürich
Opening reception: Thursday January 17, 6 – 9 pm
RaebervonStenglin is delighted to present Manuela Leinhoß's second solo exhibition at the gallery. The German artist explores the instinct for empathy that is fundamental to humanity through sculptures that are composite and curious, each bearing a mysterious interiority. In spite of their title, the works resemble not humans but furniture vessels — suitcases, cabinets, cages and boxes — whose insides are visible through holes and the use of transparent materials. Yet each conveys a complex personality and self-conscious presence.
Leinhoß's works are infused with personal history: from elements of their physicality which the artist has encountered in everyday life, to the text fragments of their titles which have been gleaned from literature and held onto to be given to the right work, rather like how one might name a child. Marked by chance and particularity, her sculptures suggest past lives and alternate selves. Their elements are ambiguous, invoking multiple associations in a way that is similar to how a likeness of words creates slippages of meaning in poetry. Night Shift (2012), for instance, incorporates a delicately veined cast made from giant leaves found on the ground in autumn, but their paired positioning and the off-white colour evokes lungs or an angel's wings — associations that are simultaneously both bodily and ethereal and which complicate the nature of the sculpture's less organic components. Significantly, the title of this work relates to the conditions of its making — the late hours Leinhoß kept whist working on it — establishing a fraternity between artist and artwork, at the same time as emphasising a potential for change, a condition common to all its exhibition companions.
In A Fellow Traveller (2013), two eye-like openings offer a view into the work whose inner secret is a black and white photograph of a ball of wool — a flat representation of a form that unravels into nothing. Leinhoß questions where the essence of being lies through such sculptures, encouraging an emotional connection with objects, yet at the same time cracks jokes at their expense. Given its title, hold-all shape and lack of handles, the holes could equally be taken as akin to the finger-holes of a bowling ball; a reading that throws any intelligence projected on the sculpture. Similarly Tiny Furniture (2013) features coasters that are cast rather than real, rendering their promise of motion entirely illusionary, whilst substantial shadows, made out of mirror or painted black wood, suggest an aspire to a dimension self-evidently beyond the works' grasp. Yet in revealing a laughable gap between their ambitions and reality, Leinhoß's works become all the more poignantly human.
