For more than 30 years, the artist team Winter/Hoerbelt has been exploring the conceptual possibilities of sculpture with a focus on space, context and recipient. For the two artists, the idea that sculpture occupies a special position in the arts, which allows a bodily experience in space through visualisation, is essential. A characteristic that they always consciously emphasise in their works. Thus, a physical approach by the viewer is at least always implied in their works.

For the exhibition „Harter Durchlass“, the artist team is again deliberately concentrating on this artistic concern and installing a room-high walk-in sculpture, a kind of pavilion entitled „Basket“, in the main room of the gallery. The material they use is steel light grids, industrial semi-finished products that at first glance do not seem suitable for art. It is a material that was developed for the stable but air- and light-permeable covering of underground shafts. With the choice of this material, they take up another central idea of their artistic work, which is connected with their interest in putting objects and semi-tools developed purely for functionality into new contexts and transforming them. In case of the „Basket“, Winter/Hoerbelt transform rough, repellent material into a sculpture that has a physically tangible presence in space and thus becomes an object that can be experienced physically and sensually.

The „Basket“ is complemented by other works with which the Frankfurt artist team balance the possibilities of sculpture and which they deliberately place in dialogue with the „Basket“ and the gallery space. What all the sculptures presented in the exhibition have in common is that they draw on objects from everyday life in their basic form, but place them in new contexts and thus create space for individual associations.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalogue and a video in which we will focus on the artistic strategies and research of the artist team.
The exhibition was supported by the programme of the Federal Government of Germany „Neustart Galerien“ in cooperation with the Kunstfonds Bonn.