In the balancing act between adventure and security, between the everyday and the extreme, things and letting go, Elisabeth Oertel transported the depth and insanity of objects and life to a surface.
The sculpture “594 km”, like an action painting, drawn from glass threads, is a living entity. It addresses decay, unarchivability and the moment in equal measure. With each additional kilometer the sculpture travels during transport, your title changes by the kilometers of transport to be added. With each time it is awakened from its slumber in a storage room and prepared to be seen, its appearance changes. Route after route, build-up after build-up, she continues to degrade. Elisabeth Oertel takes the material glass to the limit of its resilience in order to stretch and make tangible the everyday moment in which an object, a thing, is ‘consumed’.
This overcoming of materiality, is also reflected in the dangerous play with the sculptures of the series ‘Suspected Biomorphism and Other Coincidences in My Room’: discs of antique glass, colored in the traditional way and blown by hand, stand adventurously on high stilts, supporting amorphous glass objects, as if they were entering into a daring alliance with gravity. A moment of carelessness would be enough to cause the pedestal to fall along with the glass objects placed on it. Lisa Bensel