Daniel Marzona, Berlin
For their second consecutive participation in ART-O-RAMA, Berlin-based gallery Daniel Marzona will present a solo show by Johannes Wald consisting of a site-specific body of works.
The installation by Johannes Wald for ART-O-RAMA 2016 consists of a series of photographs as well as a sculpture consisting of a lose pile of limestone dust titled Stone with no form (all 2016).
The photographs were taken at the Berlin Sculpture Replica Workshop which belongs to the Collection of the National Museums of Berlin / Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. They depict the plaster molds, which are used to make replicas of sculptures in the collection. Each of these objects is the negative impression of the original, for example a head or figure from antiquity or a bust from the Renaissance.
The Berlin Replica Workshop contains more than seven thousand molds of this kind. The ones shown in the photographs of Johannes Wald have one feature in common: the original sculptures, for whose replication the molds were made up to 200 years ago, have since been destroyed, be it by fire or during WW II.
Through the loss of the original sculpture, the nature of these molds has been altered; once merely a tool for the reproduction of a sculpture, they became originals themselves. Wald choses to show these forms as sculptures rather than the plaster casts for which they are used, suggesting that the visualisation of the actual lost original sculpture is better left to our imagination.
The photographs are juxtaposed with 1,5 tons of limestone, – a generic material for sculpture – ground to a lose pile of dust, without a stable shape or form.