Wilhelm Mundt
The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to present the second solo exhibition in Berlin by Wilhelm Mundt (b. 1959).
The focus of the exhibition is the overwhelming Trashstone 412, which weighs a thousand kilos and is being presented in a gallery for the first time, having been shown at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. It is the largest sculpture thus far in his Trashstones series.
Wilhelm Mundt began the Trashstones series in 1989 with Stein 001, and the series reveals the artist to be a personality who reflects on the traditions of sculpture and the conventions of modernism (and itsbreaks with the tradition of form) while at the same time renewing it by permeating it with intellect and artisanship.
Wilhelm Mundt considers established arrangements and sequences of production as well as industrial processes, placing them in an artistic context with formal inventions that are dependent on function. Consequently, the production of a sculpture follows a principle the artist has instituted in which onesculpture leads metaphorically to the next, which is made clear by numbering them chronologically. Thus a previous sculpture and a subsequent one are always determined numerically. The films and photographs that he produces in parallel with his sculptural oeuvre represent the secondfocus of the exhibition, and they bring together the many connections in Wilhelm Mundt’s work, as is the case with the photograph of the asteroid Mathilde.
Particularly impressive is the video 3-Felder Wirtschaft (Three-field crop rotation), shown here for the first time, in which the artist ecstatically recites the text “Karoffeln, Rüben, Mais, Weizen, Roggen”(Potatoes, turnips, corn, wheat, rye) while driving in a car across expansive landscapes. Wilhelm Mundt often sees artistic creation as a performance, which in some of his works is even staged, as is the case in the performance in which he drew the ultimate consequence by packing himself within a work conceived as a perpetual motion machine into a trashstone.
In 2007 Wilhelm Mundt’s work was honored by the Royal Academy in London with the Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture. For additional information on the artist or for visual materials on the works in the exhibition, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery at any time
Wilhelm Mundt
Born 1959 in Grevenbroich. Lives and works in Rommerskirchen, Cologne and Dresden.
2009 - Professorship at University of Fine Arts, Dresden
1989 - 91 Teaching assignment at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
1979 - 86 | Kunstakademie Düsseldorf |
2007 | Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture, Royal Academy of Arts, London |
1986 | Scholarship Kunstfonds e.V., Bonn |
Universität St Gallen
Kunstmuseum Bonn
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Margulies Collection, Miami
Société Générale Collection, Paris
Universität Bayreuth
MunichRe, München
Vestas, Aarhus