DUET – Drawings, Objects And Sculptures by Marietta Hoferer and Michael Kukla

with an exhibition essay by Dirk Tölke: “Where delicate precision remains alive”

'Duett' is the name of the exhibition by Marietta Hoferer and Michael Kukla, who have often worked together, in their longtime adopted home of America and also in Germany and France, where they now live. Their works belong to the direction of Concrete Art, postulated since 1924. Neither likeness or imitation of real conditions, nor abstraction derived from nature as a formal simplification are their subject. Concrete Art uses the basic modules developed from Non-Objective Art and rudimentary form inventions to use these as modules as a starting point for free designs with this stock. Such modules experience rhythms and sequences or form patterns and structures, which as a picture do not convey any further content than form, color and space but cause a sensual experience of different orientation.

One is tempted to classify Marietta Hoferer's paintings, which are subjected to a grid, in the realm of ornamentation and patterns. Ornament, however, becomes space-determining and expands. Here it remains with a constant rhythm, which remains open to the edge, but is limited by the frame. In Marietta Hoferer's work, in addition to the arrangement of rectangular shapes, the means of design is self-adhesive PVC film, which has a sheen of its own and in more recent works also has holographic surfaces, which causes the colors to change.

Because one already notices this through gentle movements, an effect is added that one knows from OP ART, namely that one moves in front of the objects. The work is static, but changes of gaze cause the colors to shift, the highlights to turn, and a living surface to emerge. The staggered quadrilateral element itself remains alive in its strict grid structure because Marietta Hoferer cuts the foil by hand and accepts minimal deviations. Thus, there is no mathematically strict seriality.

Nevertheless, the artist inserts a module into a grid and a planned system that is gradually developed over the emergence of the picture, creates a pictorial pull and functions as a storehouse of curiosity. Proportions are added in this spiritual content that becomes visible. Sometimes the works also show spatial effect, begin to buzz and vibrate. The manual liveliness distinguishes the effect from a computer-based plotting of a program that modulates a grid. This is the artistic handwriting here, without the usual gestural trace or psychogram, and at best reading the intrusion of concentration.

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