Natalia Stachon – All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

October 31 - January 15, 2010 

'When the fact fails him, he questions his senses / when the fact fails me, I approve my senses'

The artist Natalia Stachon engraved this passage from a poem by the British poet Robert Graves into two of the elements in Thinking, a group of sculptures. At first glance, one does not notice them. As if to protect them against possible injury, the texts are hidden in the deeper layers of the sculptures, which consist of fifty two-meter-tall Plexiglas stelae distributed among the two rooms of the exhibition space. The stelae leaning on the wall and assembled on the floor appear to be waiting for something. But for what exactly? The lines from the poem suggest it, but a possible answer only emerges during the time the viewer dedicates to the interplay between Thinking and the other elements of the exhibition: both the form of the objects and installations made of Plexiglas, drywall, and copper and their arrangement in the space results in a vexingly provisional atmosphere. Everything suggests that all the constellations could shift at any moment. Do the individual objects fuse into a large context? Do the pencil drawings titled Territories turn out to be plans for an architecture of the future? Yet the opposite course would be conceivable as well: the sculptures can slip and break, then someone would come to sweep up the shards and remnants of copper and thus remove the last remaining elements of a building that is breaking down. Stachon’s works revolve around the brief moment in which everything seems possible: the time in which emerging and disappearing hold hands like twins.

This is the second solo exhibition by the artist at the Loock Galerie, the sequel to the exhibition for the opening of its new gallery spaces last year. In coming months her works will be shown at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and at the Galleria Leme in São Paulo, Brazil.

Natalia Stachon (b. 1976 in Katowice, Poland) lives and works in Berlin.