Review TAGESSPIEGEL Berlin
Heinz Ohff / TAGESSPIEGEL Berlin
Letters And Flowers
New Iron Sculptures by Jeff Beer at the Folker Skulima Gallery
What he is aiming at, to put it in Jeff Beer’s own words, is something akin to a polyphony of vision. This isn’t a poetic cliché in his case. The full-blooded musician (who studied composition, percussion and piano) merges with the full-blooded sculptor (who also paints and does ceramics). In the Sixties there was the dream of a reunion of the arts: this dream has been almost completely realised in the person of Jeff Beer, the versed and brooding artist from the Upper Palatinate, who was born in 1952. He played the organ in the Anglo-Dutch rock group „Odin“, was commissioned by Siegfried Salzmann to create an iron sculpture for the Bremen exhibition „Mythos Europa“, and in 1985 he managed to win the Bavarian State Prize in two disciplines, namely as a musician and as a sculptor. In his 3rd Berlin exhibition dedicated to his work he shows sculptures made of pieces of iron found at random which are truly polyphonic art. They have rhythm and melody. „Good sculpture“, says Beer „must be like a letter of the alphabet.“ Or, as he adds, „should be of the fragrant pungency and necessity of a flower.“ Unequivocal like letters, they have grown like flowers, they are stark, but have innumerable possibilities for variation, developing their full effect within a very small space. The mythical, reminiscent of Picasso, is finely structured or totemlike, but Beer can also create solid volumes, more often than not double-based, reminding us of stage scenery – all of this made from pre-formed, unchanged material which he leaves as he found it, material formed more or less by nature, material with a patina of rust.
Among the sculptors of iron nowadays Beer must be the philosopher and poet. The forms, creating their own spatiality, emerging, vanishing, and then coming into their own again as you walk around the mostly small figures, are based on exact sculptural observation and montage. You shouldn‘t miss the 2.74m high „Figure With Bow And Animal“ in the courtyard of the Gallery. It remains graceful in its monumentality as do the „letter“-sculptures which, even if they are relatively small, aspire to the monumental. A double effect which is perhaps based on Beer’s musical principles.
Heinz Ohff
05.05.2008, 16:36
