Willi Siber – Exakte Phantasie
11.03. – 25.06.2016
back to overviewUnbedingt anfassen! Das ist der erste und nie nachlassende Impuls, den Willi Sibers abstrakte Arbeiten ausstrahlen. Schimmernde Chromlack-Oberflächen und zartfarbige, filigrane Epoxidharz-Formen sprechen den Tastsinn ganz unmittelbar an, sie geben den Werken Transzendenz und Emotionalität. Seine Stahlskulpturen, Holzobjekte und Tafelbilder, die in vielen öffentlichen Sammlungen wie der des deutschen Bundestages vertreten sind, passen in keine Deutungs-Schublade. Stets lotet Willi Siber die Grenze zwischen Materialerfahrung und -möglichkeit aus, lässt geometrische Formen ins Anthropomorphe spielen, vergrößert Mikrostrukturen zu geometrischen Mustern, verbindet Nägel zu luftigen Farbwolken und lässt tonnenschwere Stahlarbeiten ätherisch schweben. Lustvoll demontiert Willi Siber künstlerische Ordnungsprinzipien und eingeübte Seh-Erfahrungen und erfindet sich immer wieder neu.
Touch me! This is the first, never-relenting impulse stimulated by Willi Siber’s abstract works. Gleaming, painted-chrome surfaces and delicate, pastel-colored forms made of epoxy resin directly address our sense of touch and invest the works with transcendence and emotionality. His steel sculptures, wood objects and panel paintings do not fit into any interpretive pigeonhole. Willi Siber is always exploring the boundary between the experience and possibilities of the material, pushing geometrical forms into the anthropomorphic, enlarging microstructures into geometrical patterns, joining nails into airy clouds of color and causing multi-ton steel works to hover ethereally. Willi Siber delights in dismantling principles of artistic order and accustomed visual experiences, and he continually reinvents himself.
There are endless ways to experience art. When you go to an exhibition, you will use your own particular variation. Maybe you like to go the round designed by the exhibition makers, maybe you go the other way round on principle, maybe you only look at the main works or it is too crowded for you there and you prefer the quiet corners with the somewhat more intimate works.
I have another suggestion for you: check at what age the artist created the individual works. I promise you, it is most revealing!
After all, our Western culture is crazy about youth: the ideal of youthfulness prevails everywhere, in fashion, lifestyle, cinema, in technology, on the job market. Actually a paradox, since our society has long been dominated numerically by the over-50s and we are only at the beginning of a profound demographic change. It is not a paradox that the human brain is so constituted that if one believes this dictate and thus understands ageing as a flaw or weakness, one's self-esteem actually declines. Life plans lose their ambition, the mental horizon shrinks, one becomes in a negative sense what society understands by an old person.
For art, I can tell you this evening with certainty - this is wrong! Open any art history and see how many artists over 50, 60, 70 or even over 80 are really good: In ancient art, for example, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya. In classical modern art Picasso, Käthe Kollwitz and Hannah Höch, in contemporary art Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig or Gerhard Richter. You might also like to take a look the other way round to see who got off to a rocket-like start, wrote art history or at least shook up the art market and then sank into convention and boredom at the age of 50 ...
I am very pleased to introduce to you this evening an artist who has just entered a wonderful phase in his work and life - Willi Siber. Willi Siber has been making art for 40 years, and he keeps getting better. Time and again in his career as an artist he has reinvented himself, left behind the tried and tested and the successful and set off into unknown territory. Curiosity, a love of experimentation and self-criticism, coupled with artistic confidence and experience, are the guarantee for an impressive artistic production that is still gathering momentum and from which we can expect wonderful works for many years to come. SINCE TOMORROW was once the title of an exhibition by Willi Siber and I find this an excellent characterisation for the positive charisma and the creative impulse of this artist borne by a spirit of research.
The title of our exhibition is at least as fitting: EXACT PHANTASY. Willi Siber is a sculptor, painter, constructor, tinkerer and Upper Swabian. He explores the physical possibilities of his materials with scientific meticulousness and precision and transforms these materials into structures that are pure imagination, that depict nothing but themselves and yet are so perfectly conceived that in our imagination they cannot be any different from what they are.
Let me show this with a few examples: The large standing figure (wood) is composed of two oval bodies, clearly abstract in design. Their proportions and the way they are arranged in relation to each other have clearly anthropomorphic echoes - perhaps you remember the archaic figures of Easter Island or classical portrait busts? Willi Siber contrasts this strong figurative impression by adding irregular wooden pegs to the surface and whitening the whole. Thus, at close range, we as viewers perceive above all the wonderful relief quality and materiality of the sculpture, we are thus in close contact with it. When we move further away, this feeling changes and we perceive the monumental, timeless, archaic. Delicate and respectful, intimate and majestic - Willi Siber unites opposites playfully and safely at the same time.
Or the other large standing piece here in the exhibition - made of steel and chrome lacquer. It has an extreme visual and tactile appeal. The perfect chrome finish makes its curves shine sensuously, it appears present and at the same time enraptured in glamour - like in car commercials where the bodies sparkle seductively and the camera moves very close to the sheet metal to flattering music. In her structure, the standing woman follows the classical laws of human proportion, of standing and playing legs, of open and closed form. It draws quite naturally from the fund of art history - think, for example, of antique sculptures that play through all these design principles. The aim here is to find a simplification of form that leads to the timeless, ultimately archaic. From the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the new. Siber's art can be well described by the term transfer: He reinterprets forms and materials, he transfers them into a new reality, he appropriates reality in his own way.
Willi Siber has a strong painterly component in his artistic genes, which he lives out excessively in his epoxy works. In many work steps, precisely timed, objects are created from plastic sheets, wood, cardboard, nails, which are clearly three-dimensional and which only receive a final pictorial surface in the last step, with the application of the pigmented epoxy resin. These coloured clouds float on a fine nail relief, material and detached at the same time. Willi Siber calls these objects panel paintings. He thus evokes the classical tradition, only to break it with relish in the next breath through his mixture of painting and sculpture.
Willi Siber is an Upper Swabian, ladies and gentlemen. There in Upper Swabia, the landscape is lovely and varied, the climate is mild, the people are fun-loving and Catholic. Much of Willi Siber's art - the calculated overwhelming of the viewer, the sensual splendour, the extreme surface stimulus, the transformation of the materials used and the abolition of the boundary between the individual art genres - much of Willi Siber's art can be found in the wonderful Upper Swabian baroque churches and libraries. Sensual perception as a means of experiencing God.
What truths does Willi Siber convey to us poor Hamburgers with his exact fantasies? Find out, let yourself be seduced. Take the opportunity to quiz the artist and recommend us to others - Hamburg needs more exact fantasies!
Dr Kathrin Reeckmann