Charlotte Mumm / so oft so soft
29 September - 28 October 2018
Kunststiftung Erich Hauser
Saline 36
D 78628 Rottweil
The
Kunststiftung Erich Hauser was established in 1996. A major emphasis
of the Art Foundation is the biennial Werkstattpreis. An art prize
for young sculptors to support them in their work and career. This
year the jury chose Charlotte Mumm out of a total of 19 sculptors who
were proposed by various museum directors and curators.
In
her sculptural works, installations, drawings and her painting,
Charlotte Mumm works on a unique pictorial language that moves
between figurative and abstract elements. As a crossover artist, she
reflects on the experience of space, material and surface. In her
sculptural figures, she explores personal space and its physical
boundaries, using metal joints and abstracted body forms and in that
way, explores the narrow balance between balance and free fall,
equilibrium and collapse.
In
the exhibition ‘so
oft so soft’
Mumm’s sensitive, bodily and spatial works transform the space into
a kind of open body that can trigger a wide range of human sensations
between attraction and overload. Contradictory perceptions and the
destabilization of expectations are just as important aspects of her
site-specific installation, as well as the questioning of the
implicitness of inner images and external conditions. Charlotte Mumm
is showing newly developed works in the form of tongue-shaped 84
cutouts in EPDM-rubber, which are hung and spread evenly over the
600m2 exhibition hall. It looks as if the cutouts form a sort of skin
covering the Werkstatthalle and as if the spectator is at the
interface of the inside and outside. The imagery of the cutouts pick
up on theses inner/extrinsic interfaces, dialogues and sometimes
paradox approaches in a poetic and abstract way. In another side
space of the Kunststiftung Erich Hauser, Mumm is showing several
sculptures made of casted cement and inlays of specially glazed
ceramics. Some of these sculptures are leaned against each other on
the wall. They refer to inner bodily organs and tissues with
different sort of haptic surfaces. Not given any function these
organs become a strange frozen moment of an inner gut instinct and a
figurative trigger of and to something else.
Charlotte
Mumm studied Fine Arts with Prof. Urs Lüthi at the Kunsthochschule
Kassel in Germany from 2000-2008 and spent a study year at the
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China. Her work has been
exhibited in Germany and internationally. To name a few: Galerie
Tanit in Munich, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Kasseler Kunstverein,
Eduardo Secci Contemporary in Florence, Galerie Rolando Anselmi in
Berlin.
Awards and Residencies include e.g. fellowship for the European project ‘The Spur’ at Sputnik Oz in Bratislava (Slovakia), the Saari Residency fellowship from the Kone Foundation (Finland), and a working grant given by the Ministry of Culture Lower Saxony (Germany). In 2018 she was s awarded the Werkstattpreis of the Art Foundation Erich Hauser in Rottweil (Germany), and a Sundaymorning@EKWC working grant (Netherlands).
© All pictures by Nadine Bracht for Kunststiftung Erich Hauser