untitled

Hannes Forster’s graphic works and drawings are governed by the same principles that lie at the foundation of his spatial actions. From the very start of his creative path, the German artist’s focus of interest was architecture understood as living space, which, due to its characteristic combination of creative spirit and utility of construction, is the best reflection of human culture. In keeping with this assumption, Forster’s works, which are on the borderline between installation, sculpture and architecture, are very closely linked with their surroundings. Creating particular objects, Forster refers to the specificity of the place in which they are meant to be located; hence their positioning leads to a momentary alienation of space on the one hand, and to its fuller definition on the other. Forster’s architectural works, for instance Der Berg ruft (1993) in the German town of Lünen, defy the fundamental principles of architecture: functionality and durability. Making use of architectural forms and materials,  Forster creates quasi-architectural bodies defensible only in artistic space.

Forster’s drawings, graphic works and compositions made of fibre board are all characterised by the same restraint of form, usually reduced to the simplest figures: circles, squares, T-shapes.  The motif of a cross constructed of rectangular forms reminiscent of bricks, of which Forster constructs the majority of his spatial installations, appears in his ascetic works of fibre-board or plywood. The fibre-board ones, given a capacious name of “untitled” by the author, may be treated as sui generis designs for his architectural creations, as independent geometrical abstractions, or as objects. In the framework of those compositions, geometric motifs cut in graphite-covered plywood are negative forms, an impression of the original. Paradoxically, therefore, the figurative part of the work is an absence: the “brick” crosses are not drawn, but cut out, and their outline is defined by what is left of the plywood board. These  empty shapes are elements characteristic to Forster, whose language of expression is rooted in constructivism: a trend involving both disregard for the traditionally perceived picture’s ground and the tendency to define the topic through exclusion and omission.

In his artistic practice, Hannes Forster seems to advance Kazimierz Malewicz’s suprematistic postulate to purify art of expression and the presented world, to the extremes. Defined by Forster by means of emptiness limited by the background, the pure forms of a square, cross or circle are deprived of even the materialness that they used to enjoy in traditional paintings on canvas.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

photo Jan Szewczyk

photo Jan Szewczyk

photo Jan Szewczyk

photo Jan Szewczyk