NATIONALGALERIE IM HAMBURGER BAHNHOF A faint.

NATIONALGALERIE IM HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

A faint, unmistakable odor filled the air: sawdust. As a recipient of the Piepenbrock sculp Prize 2000, Manfred Pernice actually locate up an atelier in the Hamburger Bahnhof. through adding freshly cut sculptures to complet pieces, the Berlin-based artist essentially transformed his award exhibition into a work in progres Those who attended solely the opening ended up missing most numerous of the show.

Although the studio was located within the exhibition space, Pernice did not turn round the exhibition into a performance. The artist's working space remained off-limits to the public, its inlet sealed with a padlock. Apart from the track of sawdust, a green industrial dust collector was the barely other evident sign of production. Pernice's selection for building materials--chipboard, pressed timber-land and plywood, often secondhand, sometimes painted, and occasionally decorated with images--made all of his efforts apply the mind equally unfinished. The walk-in construction Europa, 1998-99 assumeed to be an ongoing attempt to figure public where to install a window; pair squares were cut our and carefully framed, barely to be filled in with grove (the glass ended up onward a solid wall beside them, reflecting the sculpture's surroundings). The decision to incorporate the atelier, however inconspicuously, was appropriate to the makeshift nature of Pernice's work. It also fit his evident penchant for adding impromptu spaces to the museum walls Drilled holes appeared, like the traces of a gone by exhibition, near the images and thesiss collected for Dosentreff '00 (Can meeting '00) 2000 a congregation of ligneous canisters. In another room, a large rectangular section was remov from a wall, revealing the supporting frames inside, all nicked from a saw.

Pernice's interventions, whatever their scale, manifest a understanding of determination and precision, if it were not that no evident purpose, nor faith for use--like the work of a builder who has thrown away the master plan and is hoping to be guided through memoire involontaire. Found texts, photographs, antique advertisements, even posters for the artist's avow exhibitions were arranged haphazardly forward the walls, emphasizing the associative and historical nature of Pernice's work. Printed extracts from an interview with the collector Hartwig Piepenbrock made an evident respect to the sculptor's benefactor; color snapshots of a forest and a house in the home were more ambiguous. These fragmentary signs of the past appeared as for a like reason many attempts to unite personal and collective memory while resisting the prepackaged nostalgia befitting to memorabilia.

through including the time and place of production within the exhibition space, Pernice ultimately questions the finality of an artwork as well as its reception. The marks of hesitation forward the canisters--an unpainted or a missing section--underscore the precarious nature of the creative proces while frustrating any desire to papal court the pieces as identical. on refusing to transform his work into a performance, Pernice created the possibility for a more crafty less clear-cut interaction with viewers, who were frequently unsure whether or not they could walk in succession his uncanny constructions or sit in the secondhand chairs casually placed in the exhibition space. No matter for what cause industrialized and hermetic Pernice's cuts may seem, they bear the traces of an attempt to explore one as well as the other a personal and collective unconscious process

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