Wolfgang Schlegel will be showing selected work at Greene Contemporary from February 9th through March 1, 2008. There will be an opening reception on Friday February 8 from 6 to 9 pm. The exhibition will continue through Saturday March 1.
Schlegel has been making sculpture and drawing for more than twenty years. One of the principal issues that charges his work is perspective. His large scale wall relief or sculptures question accepted notions of scientific perspective allowing the viewer to construct an individual perspective view while viewing the object. For example: a work may appear to be a staircase attached to the wall however on close examination the viewer is challenged with changing issues of recognition, familiarity and disorientation. His objects or works reference the "real" world tempered with his imagination and experiences. His images in three dimensions or two create a tension for the viewer by asking them to suspend their belief in what they know about perspective and vanishing points. In his artworks Schlegel establishes new rules for understanding perspective.
In her catalogue essay for Schlegel's 2006 exhibition "Was is sehe, blickt mich an" Margit im Schlaa writes "It is the performative aspect of the sculpture that provides the aesthetic experience with a physical spatial dimension: viewers are in a precarious physical relationship to the object. Not only must they share the space with the object, they must also use the object to decide where they belong in the space."
His drawings are illusional in a different way. The illusion of the objects he draws or paints causes us to imagine his forms floating or anchored in the air of the picture plane.
Schlegel chooses forms that we think we recognize when in fact they may only have the outline or silhouette of something we have seen before or recalled seeing. His works are marvelously inventive and subtly beautiful.
Wolfgang Schlegel was born in 1956 and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1998.
From 1978-1980 he studied at the Kunstakademie Nürnberg. From 1980 – 1985 he studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Dusseldorf. In 1985, he had a residency at PS1, New York and after worked in Düsseldorf until 1996. Schlegel has won numerous awards including a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2004. He has exhibited his work internationally since 1982.