Everything that surrounds us has long been shaped by us, is designed. From everyday tools to seemingly natural landscapes; clothes, machinery, necessaries, buildings, cities – the whole environment has been modelled; food, even animals and plants are reproduced in a well defined manner. The guidelines for the creation of shapes are changing with time due to styles and fashions.

In visual art on the contrary it is the shape itself that matters or rather the expression of the subjective relation of the artist with respect to the shaped reality. The artistic work is quasi free of the need for a definite functionality.

However, the act of drawing a sharp line between designed tools and art objects lacking a well-defined function is a delicate one: the formal languages of art and design are influencing each other thereby blurring this line more and more for different reasons.
 
Goods of consumption are not only designed to optimize their functionality but their shape is meant to distinguish them from comparable competing products. Since long fine art doesn’t provide designers with any general guidelines for aesthetical quality anymore. It is even that art is borrowing forms and patterns from design thereby rendering the separation line permeable from both sides.

The exhibition pro forma presents art works using everyday forms or decorative patterns as given designed material to be elaborated in an playful manner or to be set into dislocated contexts. In spite of their simple and familiar formation they evoke a surprisingly strange reaction in the observer’s eye thereby disturbing our efforts of classifying them with respect to categories as function or taste.

A hostess is lying on top of a champagne bar while serving champagne from a lower part of the object. The champagne is dripping into a bowl. The visitor is invited to kneel down and drink the liquid directly from one of the mouthpieces. (C.D.)

Esterman's models are architectural objects intervevning in real, i.e. everyday's space as well as functioning as projection motifs for virtual spacial situations. (F. Steininger)

Gerhard Hahn is confronting methods, materials and defects of mass production with his personal artistic visions. In this field of tension he is creating hybrid objects between technics and organics thereby assigning an authentic, human dimension to the work and its production process.
The presented works are results of the project THE LANGUAGE OF IRON at Kohler Co. iron foundry, Wisconsin and the project REPRODUKTUS with the Saint Gobain Group in Bexbach/Saar with the synthetic high-temperature ceramic Silicium Carbide (see image).

Schlesinger is either modifying industrially produced shapes to create new objects or having individual shapes crafted by machines: He is measuring function and art.

Tolmatcheff creates interventions on the border line between furnishing of urban space and art in public space by thematically adjusting them to the respective users.

invitation card ©: Ulrike Stockhaus
images ©:the artists; opening: Jens Sundheim
concept and organisation: Barbara Koch | Willi Otremba | Ulrike Stockhaus
concept and organization transversale: Ulrike Stockhaus

supported by: Sparkasse Dortmund, Cultural Department of the City of Dortmund