Gereon Krebber
Omonymo
Marburger Kunstverein
Hessen, Germany
Oct 13 – Dez 7, 2023

Program:
Artist talk | “Laberflash”
Thursday, 23 November 6pm
with Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg (director of Kunstmuseum Bonn) and Gereon Krebber

Finissage | “More commitment, please”
Thursday, 7 December 6pm
with Florian Peters-Messer (collector, Viersen) and Gereon Krebber

Guided tours
Every Saturday, 4 pm

“It seems that, in the last three or four years, Krebber‘s art has become darker, heavier in both material and contents, more morbid and focused on transience, on processes of decay and decomposition. The bright, light materials of plastic wrap and gelatin have been replaced with burnt wood and above all, polyurethane foam. Colored with spray paint and covered with epoxy resin, the banal construction foam takes on a strange, iridescent materiality. The shining layer of resin makes it appear precious, like the glazes on ceramics. But from a distance, the material in the form of writhing snakes or worms, with its indefinable, oscillating colorfulness, seems like damp, foreign, organic tissue. In the words of the artist, it is: „as if they had been pulled out of a swamp“. It is more the simple static basic forms, which he builds from this material, blunt cones, blocks or „boxes,“ and yet they seem on the verge of collapsing under their own weight. Entire sections cave in, seemingly becoming liquid, pouring over the floor.

As improbable as it may seem at first glance, apparently in Gereon Krebber‘s art, there is a strong tendency towards the anthropomorphic. For ultimately, all of the organic creatures, the cocoons and worms made of plastic wrap, the sculptures of gelatin (Krebber calls it „ground- up cow“), the slimy entrails made of construction foam, are variations of his occupation with corporeality, driven by a mix of fascination and repulsion. Even as a teenager, Krebber says, he photographed mountains of meat in the slaughterhouse, and spent a long period of time drawing a dead mouse he kept in the freezer. What fascinates him about his works with gelatin is that the material, after it has swelled in water and glycerine, „displays roughly the same consistency as one‘s own body.“ But on a more fundamental level, relevant for interpreting the works, this is not about the obsessions of an artist, but about the simple reality that we neither understand nor aesthetically esteem too much our bodies and the organic processes that go on inside of them without our having to do anything, the reason why we mostly suppress both. By objectifying aspects of this foreignness of our biological side in the medium of sculp- ture, Gereon Krebber puts processes of recognition in motion. The „shift capacity“ in his works consists in the fact that aspects of corporeality recur in the culturally established form of abstract sculpture. The particular quality of Krebber‘s art is revealed in the fact that it equally foregoes any existential pathos or shock aesthetics, coming across instead in a more subtle way, with surreal poetry and with a good portion of irony and a quirky sense of humor. »

Excerpt from Peter Lodermeyer: Sculpture’s Capacity of Shifting. Gereon Krebber. In: Vom blorp zum Blobster, Bielefeld/Berlin 2013, S. 56 ff. Translation from the German: Elizabeth Volk.