Lippische Gesellschaft für Kunst e.V. (Lippe Art Association), 21 May – 18 June 2017

Black shadows, bodiless silhouettes that remain still or move very gently in a draught — dream images. It’s not as if there were something indecisive about the forms. Their structure is as complex as it is precise, the perfection in the execution impressive. And yet they have this ephemeral aura. Their transparency and hovering lightness give them the appearance of a fleeting existence that can scarcely be grasped. Even on closer inspection their contours do not become any sharper: the gaze does not adhere to these glittering formations. Their surfaces dissolve, the closer you come to them. They are not so much bodies as flowing forms of transformation that become visible in these works. Panta Rhei — Everything Flows is what Luise Unger calls one of her works from 2005 that could be counted among the group of cellular forms. It vaguely reminds you of a cell about to divide. Unger’s works take us into a world of constant change, of growth and decay. Primal forms that are won from the mysterious weaving of nature in order to assume visual shape in the flash of an artistic moment. And how can you grasp such forms inspired by nature better than by a technique which is indebted to the imitation of nature?

After years of experimentation with flexible and easily formed materials, Luise Unger discovered the technique of crochet for herself. With this textile technique she takes up one of the oldest cultural forms of all. The textile techniques transform the procedures inherent in living nature itself into cultural techniques: they are forms of joining and connecting by means of knots, loops, meshes and interweavings as they first arose in the shapes of nature. Think of the ‚textile‘ and simultaneous ‚constructive‘ forms of spiders‘ webs, of cocoons, nests, dams, or the constructions made by insect colonies. Insofar, for textile techniques, a universality can be derived that leads back into the primal history of artistic forms in times when culture first arose. They belong to the building blocks of civilized life and also serve architecture as a model.

A special feature of the technique is the material chosen in each case. The metallic stainless steel wire stands in a certain opposition to traditional textile materials of vegetable and animal origin. It introduces its own laws: its high degree of flexibility and stability with minimal mass, its cool smoothness, its seductive lustre. It enables the production of an equally complex and airy, seamless web in almost any form, including sculpturally rounded forms. With this material Unger produces not so much closed surfaces, but network-like structures, more like outlines of bodies drawn in the air than solid, corporeal formations.

These sculptures do not respect the laws of statics: they hang from the ceiling or on the wall and, without this hold, they would collapse in on themselves. They make an interstice between form and non-form. They emerge basically from the line. Just as the line in two dimensions condenses into a drawing, here mesh upon mesh builds into a voluminous, three-dimensional texture. The analogy of the manual, uniformly flowing movement of crocheting with writing is obvious and finds in the paper works a further correspondence. The words ‚texture‘ and ‚text‘ are both derived from Latin ‚textere‘, which signifies not only ‚to weave‘ and ‚to plait‘, but also more generally ‚to join‘, ‚to make‘ and ‚to draft‘. These metaphorical derivations arose during the emergence of writing in the history of culture.2 Such interconnections must not be neglected in an oeuvre in which language assumes high rank as an additional means of forming. Unger’s titles go far beyond the status of a loosely associative addition, and may be viewed without doubt as a congenial literary achievement. It does not make any difference whether it takes up onomatopoeic inventions such as Hornicht, Heliko and Hubba, or is oriented toward concrete or literarily connotated concepts such as Die Säumerin (The Seamstress), Nexus and Malina. The poetry of the titles provides a subtext that underscores the oeuvre’s narrative element. Luise Unger is a weaver or spinner who spins her thread from the soil of archaic experiences, forming her mythical narrative from them. One mesh comes to another, gradually growing into formations revealing their origin in the depths of the unconscious. They are grounded in inaccessible areas when humankind was still rooted in nature. The unity of human beings and nature is one of the fundamental experiences of being human. These sculptural messengers from a far-off world recall them. A vague memory of our ultimately indissoluble connection with nature, of which we will always be a part despite all alienation, can be ignited by them.

Precisely the slowness with which these formations naturally emerge enables the artist to create unmediatedly from her own intuition. It is really a process of creation that allows the inner idea to be followed in the most subtle way, reminiscent of a growth process. It is not a matter of mere diligence, but of achieving a state of permeability that is promoted by the uniformity of the action as in a meditative exercise.

Luise Unger says that the forms come to her from far off, as if from another time or another world. She thus situates herself in the tradition of the artist as a medium: think of Jackson Pollock, for instance, who with his drippings likewise insisted that he was completely stepping back as an artist, solely in order to help the painting to come to its own expression. Nevertheless, in abstract expressionism, a pleasurable fulfilment of the genius-artist-subject simultaneously joined in the expressive gesture. Unger’s crochet technique, by contrast, is defined more by a retarding element that demonstrates even a certain automatism. Tension arises here not through bodily expressiveness, but through concentrated, inward-directed intensity and sensibility. Extreme self-discipline is the precondition for this high aim of such perfection of form, with its finely balanced proportions and the differentiated, often multilayered structure. The artist-ego steps back completely behind the work.

Apart from the stupendous complexity of many of her works, in others, a yearning for complete simplicity comes to the fore. In Umhüllung (Envelope) and Nexus it is precisely the generosity and plainness of the gesture that call forth an impression of timeless beauty. An essential component of all these sculptures is air: to this element they owe their translucent elegance with which they hover, scarcely graspable, before our eyes, as if appearing only for a moment and then already disappearing. Air is the enlivening element that breathes the breath of life into things through its movement, but is equally characterized by its fleetingness; it can be neither seen nor held onto. The quiet, perceptible, passing breath is also even physically present in titles such as Hornicht, Heliko and Hubba through the initial letter H signifying the aspiration of breath. Equally vital and changeable is the light. In the curves of the shiny metal wire, it is caught in multiple reflections and contributes significantly to the sculptures’ supersensuous impression. When Luise Unger additionally scorches the wire with a Bunsen burner, as in the works Hubba and Kontinuum (Continuum), so that the silver stainless steel takes on an iridescent multicoloured hue, this tendency is reinforced. The forms appear even lighter and more mobile. They are withdrawn even further from a comprehensibility or conceptuality, seem more vulnerable, but also more untouchable and more precious.3 Depending upon the incidence of light, this effect can intensify to a shimmering bodiliness reminiscent of soap bubbles.

Despite all their fragility, these sculptures embody the energy and cycle of a pantheistic world that can only be grasped and comprehended in segments. Despite their transparency, it is often scarcely possible to penetrate into the innermost core. They have something uncontrollable about them, changing their shape with every draught and from every new perspective. From this they develop their autonomous life. They appear to be simultaneously reified and ensouled. From the personal union of the artist, Luise Unger, with the artist, Nature, they develop their autonomous character. In the paper works, the impression of their emerging out of themselves is likewise reinforced. In some works Unger allows one or two ink-drops to fall on the sheet and describe their own traces by moving the paper. At another point, in turn, structures and hatching recall semi-automatic drawings. Here too, the graphic strictness of black-and- white is softened by various forms of rampant growth that entertain a suspenseful relationship with each other. Open and closed forms interpenetrate in a mutually stabilizing relationship.

Luise Unger’s works treat transitions between various states of being. Like silver, shimmering shades, they hover self-engrossed in space. Their purely graphic structure comes to the fore sometimes more, sometimes less strongly, or it lays itself as a shadow on the wall. Under strong incidence of light, the structure is outshone by the sculptural volume of the entire form to such an extent that its materiality seems to be suspended.

Translated from the German by Dr. Michael Eldred, artefact text & translation, Cologne

Luise Unger “immerses herself in air”¹ just as other people plunge into some kind of involvement. So it is not surprising that her work involves a sort of floating. At first sight the sculptures of the past ten years seem like structures that have pupated in a silver-grey web. They have paused in this process of becoming and linger for a moment. Tranquillity emanates from them. They seem sensually soft and airily delicate. One would like to touch them gently as if they were sensitive creatures. However this tranquillity is fleeting – only a “transitional phenomenon”. During prolonged observation the eye follows the inner movement of these sculptures. Several layers of bodiless sheathing are interwoven, hinting at possible forms as in a process of Morphing. The gaze seems to penetrate the interior of an organism, directed towards the microcosm of cellular growth. Biomorphic forms converge like cells before the moment of procreation; boundaries become blurred and fade away, and new ones come into existence through detachment and isolation (Spin, Heliko). In other works these are layerings of anthropomorphic sheaths whose flowing forms touch on incarnation (Schattenkörper, Träumer, Cor). Unger speaks of “a minimal awareness and a vague memory of her own procreation without being able to explain that”.

The fact that the inner movement of this sculpture becomes visible at all is due to the special nature of its surface. This serves “as an indication of what is concealed”. The silver-grey web, which just now seemed so soft and vulnerable, is actually made of tough stainless-steel wire. Do these impressions and characteristics only apparently contradict one another? Unger herself makes this loosely-meshed web, deploying a time-consuming crochet technique without seams. This is highly permeable to light, air, and sight, and in direct sunlight becomes increasingly impalpable. The nature of this surface allows it to become a spiritual filter and mediator of what is in the air. Its permeability makes perceptible the accumulation of layers of sheaths, leading to a visual instability of optical stimuli.² The eye has no choice but to feel its way to and fro between the outer sheath and the inner forms as if investigating a nucleus. This reciprocal interpenetration of outside and inside may express what Unger calls “a yearning to be able to grasp something unfathomable”. In some of these sculptures chimeras of colour, formed by the impact of heat on the wire, also dance on the surface. The material rigour of the stainless-steel diminishes and the webs seem like soap-bubbles which, contrary to expectation, do not burst (Agalma, Panta Rhei, Ephemer).

The playful and associative aspect of Unger’s work does not assert itself; it remains discrete, revealing itself most clearly through the choice of names: Unkulunkulum, Hornicht, Atavaka, Dunkler und Dunklin, Galiola, HumptyDumpty … These titles have to be spoken aloud if their onomatopoeic poetry is to be grasped. Perhaps they even conceal impish wit in conjunction with the elemental. At any rate the verbal sounds seem a phonetic recreation of the sculpture’s inner movement.

Before Luise Unger decided to limit herself to thin stainless-steel wire as the starting-point for her work, she employed a combination of materials: wood, cotton, hemp, wax, and various metals. In that earlier phase of creativity the wire-web was only used in a few works (Dauern, Undula, Flügel) – and then always in the form of industrially manu- factured mesh. The sculpture from that phase has in common the deployment of black paint. These are geometrical forms whose silhouettes are clearly delineated. Their interiors consist of hollow areas while the exterior surface is akin to smooth damp skin stretched over mysterious areas of unevenness. These sculptures confront the observer with deep black shadows as if from some memory of an unfamiliar time or ancient epoch (12 Türme, Die Säumerin). In their darkness they draw all the light to themselves and, thus charged with energy, they float, albeit only minimally. However, impermeable as the surface is, the energy within can scarcely unfold productively. An oppressive encapsulation and a painful “transition from continuity to discontinuity” become apparent. Only the threads and strips that detach themselves from some of the sculptures and dangle playfully above the floor convey the impression of keeping alive a memory of continuity and wholeness.

As previously mentioned, three wire-web works were created during Unger’s black sculpture phase. Prominent here is her first work Dauern, which dates from 1987 when she was at the Academy. The web is extremely closely meshed and through this fine ash penetrates sporadically. Unger structured the web as 25 similarly-sized pipes, transformed through irregularities and individually varied on the surface. In the following year she made a start on Undula with the wire-web indicating a wave-like movement which seems to become flatter by way of 21 variations from above to below. Continuous cords thread through both works, emphasising their serial character and incidentally making possible a floating hanging. The idea of a series is continued in more recent works utilising crocheted wire-web (including Ja und Nein). In these sculptures Unger seems to be implementing variations on a potentially endless Morphing within which primordial biological forms, such as cells, can be enfolded.

The serial technique becomes even more apparent if the interwoven wire sculptures of the past 20 years are seen as a series. A strategy of variation seems to be proclaimed as Unger’s artistic method. As the years pass she increasingly renounces choice of a true form for her sculpture. Instead she resorts to ever new variations of bio- and anthropomorphic forms. Unger thus switches emphasis from selection to combination.³ She thereby draws on a virtual archive of possible forms which can be viewed as the real location of her artistic subjectivity. It is not surprising that her virtual archive consists of such bio- and anthropomorphic forms. Unger grew up on a farm and from an early age has been familiar with birth and growth in nature. The ethical dimension of her approach also becomes unmistakeable in this archive.

Nevertheless today’s observer will not encounter Morphing in Unger’s sculpture unless he or she is aware of mass dissemination of our communication culture with screensavers implementing programmed Morphing of geometrical and biological forms. The source and destination of these self-transforming forms are also no longer identifiable in Unger’s variations. However in her sculpture the Morphing takes place in real three-dimensional space and real time – i.e. is evoked solely by optical stimuli at work in the brain – rather than in electronic animation. Within our communication culture of screensavers‘ mass-morphing Unger’s artistic method is disturbingly contemporary. Her variations of bio- and anthropomorphic forms float motionlessly in space while prompting our brains to bring about their transformation.

1 Quotations whose source is not mentioned derive from recordings of conversations with Luise Unger
2 Pöppel, Ernst (2006): Kunstausflug; in: Der Rahmen, Ein Blick des Gehirns auf unser selbst; Munich, Vienna, p. 183-213
3 Groys, Boris (2008): Auf der Suche nach der stehenden Zeit; in: Die Kunst des Denkens; Hamburg, p. 130-149.