Armin Göhringer

"Kräftespiel"

Opening: Friday, September 12th 2014, 6 PM
Opening Speech: Brigitta Höpler, Art Historian
Exhibition: September 13th until October 28th

Since about 25 years ago, Armin Göhringer has been crafting sculptures from wood. At Galerie Hrobsky, the artist is showing works created in the last five years that deal with the complex and diverse notions of balance, the interplay of equilibrium and instability. Through his contained but accented use of colour, the character of the material is preserved – the wood is sometimes left raw, sometimes blackened or whitened.

With his chainsaw, Göhringer treats walnut, oak, cherrywood or poplar and creates geometric-abstract forms like cubes, blocks, rods or grids, forms that bear a certain figurative potential within their reduction. The artist’s interest lies in the polarities of the relationships between head and body or horizontal grooves, cuts, vertical lines and grid structures, that make it possible to look through and behind the sculpture, opening the compact entities up into the space around them. The lying and standing objects sometimes remind us of abstracted torsi, inspiring in their formal simplicity.

Not only formal issues are relevant to the artist, however, during his creative process, substantial aspects are equally important. Within the interplay of fragile-transparent and massive-blocked forms Göhringer articulates the conceptual claim of his oeuvre: The forces within a piece of wood determine each other like the forces of nature themselves. The artist is constantly analysing and feeling out possibilities with regard to content: How does nature oppose mankind? At which point are transgressions irreversible and the natural balance forever lost?

Armin Göhringer repeatedly brings the terms growth and destruction, life and death into play. In this context, the concept of time and transience isn’t far away, either. Apart from the fact that trees have a much higher life expectancy than people, it is important to use time in a qualitative way. Göhringer’s sculptures unite qualitative characteristics like harmony, asymmetry, simple beauty and straightforwardness, all of which are pillars of far-eastern philosophy. Thereby the sculptures invite us to regard them with a certain absorption. Where does the past end? Where does the future begin? Always in the present moment.

(Hartwig Knack,Kunstmagazin Parnass September 2014)