Stephan Dillemuth’s creative apply takes place in a testing of strategies and spheres of self-determination, which he understands as bohemian analysis laboratories. This articulates an aesthetic that doesn’t search to emulate the manufacturing business in one other commerce, however as a substitute operates in an open-ended, dilettante, provisional and sometimes collective method. Regardless of an astonishingly broad body of reference, starting from the Life Reform motion to blockchain know-how and the sweetness gallery at Nymphenburg Palace, Dillemuth has created an astonishingly concise oeuvre through the years that builds on each other.

Dillemuth’s exhibition on the Kunstverein, “Wenn die Wirklichkeit kommt” (When Actuality Comes), presents latest works which have a charged relationship to processes of actuality manufacturing. The start line for this will have been the simultaneous whirring of opposing actuality machines, as Dillemuth skilled as a pupil throughout a information broadcast within the packed counterculture pub Ratinger Hof; moments of this have discovered their approach into the exhibition by way of the lighting and the newsflash. The works framed by this transport one other stage of irritated or switched-off expertise of actuality, specifically that of lockdowns through the COVID-19 pandemic. In spite of everything, they have been all created at exactly that (historic?) second that was skilled and might be remembered above all as a suspension or standstill. Sure formal parts enable conclusions to be drawn about this collective expertise, together with the quite a few inclusions of birds within the sculptures on show and the massive variety of photos of wildlife (“Nature is coming again!”). In spite of everything, they have been all created at exactly that (historic?) second that was skilled and might be remembered above all as a suspension or standstill. Sure formal parts enable conclusions to be drawn about this collective expertise, together with the quite a few inclusions of birds within the sculptures on show and the massive variety of photos of wildlife (“Nature is therapeutic!”). The reliefs paying homage to Pompeian excavation websites additionally evoke an extra, albeit whole, standstill of actuality with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Concurrently, however maybe above all, the works configure a everlasting stock of Dillemuth’s creative work and bohemian analysis, which through the years has thrown off quite a few syntagms which have congealed into a proper grammar. Examples of this are the sugar crystals used as leitmotifs, which return to a preoccupation with the Life Reform motion, colored Plexiglas, which Dillemuth has carried with him since a keep in Chicago on the finish of the Nineteen Eighties, and the goat, which has develop into Dillemuth’s scrawling signature as a “counter-figure” or totem of the viewers. All these syntagms of an exploratory creative apply are moulded, mixed, copied, bent and reassembled. Every work is a plaster golem that doesn’t fake to be made for eternity, however fairly likes to crumble over time.

Equally vital on this grammar are numerous pointing formulae: supposedly connecting flooring drawings, showcase superstructures in addition to peepholes and home windows. It’s as if Dillemuth continuously wished to nail the mediation facet to the humanities and thus emphasize their elementary relationship to society—be it a rejecting, commenting or shaping one. Which in flip alludes again to the preoccupation with actuality; in any case, realities, or fairly their acceptance, are to a big extent mediations that would additionally end up in a different way.

at Neue Essener Kunstverein
till August 18, 2024