DUSSELDORF.- Beck & Eggeling presents the second solo exhibition of new works by the sculptor Gehard Demetz (*1972). The exhibition is on display until 21st December 2013.
The Tyrolean Gehard Demetz creates fascinatingly detailed sculptures and objects from basswood. Particularly his figures of children, confronting the viewer with blank eyes and in provocative poses, show his very own and strong artistic imagery. Most of the children are endowed with different attributes in an oppressive way: A young pinioned boy holds a saw in his hands, another raises his empty hands high above his head, wearing on his belt a cross like a gun. Demetz's works question the value system of our society today, as the artist puts religious symbols and everyday objects into new contexts, thus creating new meanings.
The exhibition also shows Demetz's ongoing artistic development by means of several sculptural objects that enter into a dialogue with the children figures. These are based on sacred objects, but are alienated by abstraction and contextualization.
The traditional craft of "Herrgottschnitzerei", of great importance in his native South Tyrol, is the starting point for Demetz's technical approach. In constant engagement with traditional techniques and figures of the genre, the artist has developed a distinctive, contemporary language. His sculptures are not created by removing wood from a trunk, but by assembling a multitude of individual pieces. By consciously leaving gaps between these individual parts, Demetz refers to the concepts of completeness, emptiness, and the fragmentary.
The title The Snow Comes From The Moon makes reference to the simplified explanations with which adults answer children's questions. These satisfy the curiosity of the children, and when they grow adult, they leave them greater room for interpretation than the actual scientific explanation. Demetz says: "In some stages of life, one misses this playfulness, fantastic, that can often have something very true in my eyes."
After studying at the school for sculptors in Selva di Val Gardena, Tyrol, Gehard Demetz lectured at this school for ten years. He refined his training at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg in 2000 and 2001. In 2007, he received the Richard Agreiter Art Prize for sculpture. The artist lives and works in Selva di Val Gardena.
Since 2002, Demetz's work has been shown in various solo exhibitions, for example at the Kunstverein Recklinghausen in 2013 and at the Villa Wessel Museum Iserloh in 2008. They were also represented in numerous group exhibitions, e.g. at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan in 2011, at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim in 2012, and in the Galleria Nazionale, Palazzo Spinola in Genoa in 2009.
