Online exhibition

 
Galerie Schlichtenmaier presents works by sculptor Werner Pokorny. Like hardly any other artist, Pokorny has found his own visual language as a wood and steel sculptor, which is thematically unmistakable and yet does equal justice to both materials: While wood opens up far-reaching possibilities for individual creation, depending on the origin and hardness of the grown material, but also on the necessary speedy processing by the chain saw, steel requires detailed process sequences, but in the end achieves a resilient statics that sets hardly any limits to size. The appeal of the material itself lies in its surface characteristics - the wood "works", the steel "develops". These ultimately anthropomorphic traits also lead, in terms of content, to an ambivalence of emphatically simple things that form a fixed canon in Pokorny's work: House and vessel, here bowl or vase, more rarely rib formations or circle and sphere. Partly inspired by archaic cultures, partly animated by contemporary social developments, the things stand for human sensitivities. The sculptor keeps the symbolism of his ciphers open - the house, for example, conveys protection and home, but at the same time shows a downright wavering appearance; the vessels, on the other hand, are sometimes veiled, sometimes open. Pokorny is always concerned with balance, as an act of planned equilibrium or as a kind of momentary situation that remains unpredictable. The viewer is interactively involved: The form and being of things, which Pokorny plays through in this both/and or neither, make the viewer an active observer, through whose attitude the work first takes this or that turn - and they turn him into the homo ludens that Friedrich Schiller had in mind: "The material," it says in his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, "must be treated in such a way that we retain the ability to exchange it immediately with the lightest play."