Sorcha Dallas

International Project Space opens its new season of projects with a two-person exhibition by two previously unconnected German artists developing distinct, varied and complimentary sculptural installations within different international contexts. Stumpf’s roughly manipulated materials combine within filmic scenarios as sculptures acting as ‘protagonists’ for further actions. These sculptures will exist within the architectural prototypes and alterations of Schafer who has been appropriating and fictionalising architectural plans, facades and histories over the last decade. Schafer’s printed and sculptural works complement Stumpf’s ‘characters’ with a space fluctuating between absolute function and utopian decoration. Within International Project Space Schafer and Stumpf’s spatial and visual divergencies are utilised to form a brief encounter of current sculptural imaginings.

In ‘The Arcade Project’ Walter Benjamin writes that ‘history decays into images, not into stories’. Michael Stumpf’s sculptures and installations are concocted of images, objects and materials shifted from their original contexts and relocated within a new imagined narrative. These hybrid objects become an anthology of dislocated referents, each element functioning as part of a persistently elusive whole, which, like a frozen frame in a movie or a torn out page in a book, offers the viewer only a partial glimpse, a displaced scene, a snapshot of a larger scenario. Nature, culture, craft, decoration, cinema, folklore and literature collide and interweave in works which use denim, plastic, aluminium, paper, pewter and other elements to create a sometimes poetic, sometimes perilous material alphabet. The particularity of Stumpf’s sculptural vernacular imbues the objects with a curious internal logic, an absoluteness that makes them entirely plausible, and yet still slippery and enigmatic, like something half-remembered and then remade with absolute conviction.

Albrecht Schafer works are developed at the intersection between architectural situations and material conditions and their alteration by means of artistic interaction. What is automation? is a new artwork made through an intervention into the automated lithographic printing process during the printing of Design Strategy, R. Buckminster Fuller, 1966, originally published in Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, 1969. Due to the manual nature of the intervention the artwork exists within each copy of the book as a unique discoloration in response to question 23 of a set of 40 that form the basis for Gavin Wade’s curatorial project Strategic Questions. Schafer is pasting the pages of the book directly onto the gallery walls as one of a number of architectural interventions within the show. His ongoing work White Window forms Schafer’s second intervention as windows adjacent to International Project Space are painted on the outside with white paint. A constantly expanding graffiti has appeared in previous incarnations of this work, giving rise to a complex interplay between interior and exterior, between actor and viewer. Schafer’s third work further pursues a hand made interference with the functional gesture of lighting a starting point for a set of organic ‘drawings’, transforming the gallery space with the physical lines and thrown light and shadow. Each of Schafer’s works offers a sequence of error and divergence from a standard system, production or space where, as in many of his previous works, he enacts a self reflexive archaeology of forms and ideals.

Exhibition curated by Ruth Claxton and Gavin Wade