Treatment of Fragility Installation

Peter Riss is a German sculptural artist and one of the most striking members of the European school of post-minimalism; however the work he produces is not limited by the confines of any stylistic frameworks. His work uses both materials and the exposition space as the main foundational elements of his exhibition canvas: the reduction of form and the cold geometry of his paintings, sculptures and objects collide with almost kitsch elements and the bold figurative constraints of three-dimensional art. By skilfully striking a balance between the opposite poles of the abstract and figurative, Riss creates an inimitable artistic aesthetic of conflict. Through the use of formal oppositional techniques, Riss draws the viewer’s attention to his main issue, the issue of duality, of the bipolarity of man and nature. We can see this in the way that he alternates between ordered cubist lines and more universal, bestial and intricate forms, suggesting primitive themes of fear and taboo, turning the viewer into the object of powerful visual experiments. The combining of logical geometric forms with the gilded skeletons of animals, the presence of what appear to be worm-eaten perforations on the sterile, glossy surface of his paintings: these horrifying aesthetics are used to explore man’s pathological inclinations towards his own self-destruction. In his work Riss skilfully combines both natural and synthetic materials (wood, bone, plastic, latex), thus representing in a visual form the artist’s emotional opposition between structures and natural chaos, between the past and the present, between purity and decay.

Installation:Metal on Steel

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:33.5 W x 33.5 H x 9.1 D in

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