21 March to 28 May 2012
Volker Saul Aluminum Cuts
Cabinet Exhibition Room 10

Paintings by Cologne artist Volker Saul (born in 1955 in Düren) seem like oversized scissor-cut silhouettes that appear to enlarge unknown details of an amorphous world. Saul is an inventor and collector of forms, ordering the visual vocabulary of his works into typological series and bringing them together in complex picture worlds. His compositions, reduced to silhouettes, create - probably precisely due to their two-dimensionality - a spatiality that is equally reminiscent of the endless expanse of outer space and of photographs of microbiological structures; the term reminiscent does not really fit, however, since it is less a matter of reminding us of something we already know, which comes to life again here, than it is the notion of unknown spaces and things that first become concrete in his works. Since the silhouettes of his compositions tend to be translated into the spatiality, the role played by the viewer's own fantasy is essential. If we think back to the popularity of the silhouette in the 18th and 19th century and its use for illustrating children's books, the change in perspective caused by Volker Saul's pictures becomes tangible: We gaze from a dwarf's perspective to monumentally wondrous worlds, which do not seem to stop moving. The exhibition is showing for the first time three examples from a new series of monochrome painted aluminum cut works. The materiality of the works, which is harder than paper, not only emphasizes the object character of these works, but also the technoid aspect of his associations of forms: a fabulous fairy-tale world encounters the industrial high tech. Art is an ambiguous matter.

(Artist booklet))

Artist talk with Volker Saul
26 April 2012, 6 p.m.

Art museum of the
Archdiocese of Cologne