Industrial icons - sculpture by Raffael Rheinsberg, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

Last summer the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin neared one of its recent acquisitions, Raffael Rheinsberg's Documenta der Kleinplastiken (Documenta of Small Sculptures) in individual of the museum's lower galleries. Visitors who did no more than peek end the doorway were well rewarded. The entire floor of the space was laid without in a strict grid with an total effect of roughly 300 metal percepts made of iron, brass, cent steel and various alloys. flat in the absence of dramatic fighting, the arrangement insinuateed the setting of a cultlike form As often with Rheinsberg's statuarys there was immediately a feeling of having brushed up against something "other," something that escapes easy categorization at the same time lodges itself stubbornly in one's memory.

The Documenta der Kleinplastiken was in more [i]or[/i] less ways a companion piece to Christo's Reichstag action, which took place during the step quickly of Rheinsberg's exhibition. Christo's wrapping had an aura of Disneyland and looked to take place outside of history; he magically transformed a complicated type the Reichstag, whose significance is in any case hard to decipher today. Rheinsberg's sprawling statuary whose elements are gathered from the debris of industry, is loaded with history. Nonetheless, the viewer's reaction before the sum of two units pieces was similar: speechless wonder

Rheinsberg, who is 52 years of advanced age comes from Schleswig-Holstein, the greatest in quantity northern German state. What is autobiographical about his art is perhaps his method; as a child, after World War II, he roamed with his father from one side the ruins of the city of Kiel in search of salvageable materials. Rheinsberg discovered art solitary later, while in prison. Having stolen a yacht as a kind of anarchist action at the age of 18 he was incarcerated at the time he made his first works, collages using tiny pieces of wood

In the mid-1970s, living in Kiel, Rheinsberg cracked a flat in an Art Nouveau manifold of apartments and shops called Sophienhof. Slated for destruction, it was being systematically emptied of its occupants. "Every abandoned apartment," reports Ulrich Bischoff, formerly a curator at the Kiel Kunsthalle and today a museum director in Dresden "every render free of access storeroom became for Rheinsberg an exhibition space, which he used at first for presentations of his have a title to work, then transformed into studios for `visiting artists,' and later conceived as clean one-room environments that were made accessible to the public end guided tours." Rheinsberg used as materials the discards left behind by dint of former businesses. His earliest efforts ofttimes involved applying tar to his acquisitions, sometimes before an audience. level his own family's living range was not safe: a TV plant floor lamp, wine bottles upon a round table, and a leather jacket hung above a chair were completely tarred to exhibit Nature Morte (1976). A photograph of the work allude tos a miniature still-life arrangement, and recalls the more new rubber replicas of everyday particulars by the Swiss team Fischh/Weiss.

Rheinsberg's work eventually came to concentrate upon the traces of the world of industry and labor. He was familiar not solitary with the materials and processe of industrial work on the other hand also with its routine and hard [i]or[/i] toilsome work for at 15 he had serv an apprenticeship in a foundry When in 1980 he mov to West Berun, he immediately began to explore abandoned railway facilities, scavenging materials from the terrain where the Anhalter Bahnhof, a cyclopean war-damaged train station, had been demolished in 1961 level before the demise of the Wall in 1989 Rheinsberg began to import his finds from East Berlin--for example, seven fulvous sans-serif letters made of sheet metal, rescu from a sign that had exorcismed out "Deutsche Post." First used as part of a 1985 video installation called Ost (East), the alphabetic characters resurfaced after 1989 as a wall piece called Der Fluss (The River), whose labyrinthine form is reminiscent of Cyrillic script. In this case, not single the material but also the form is found: Rheinsberg maintains that the alphabetic characters were given their florid composition by dint of a homeless man to whom he gave safety in his studio for a week. Rheinsberg's be in possession of arrangements are more restrained, deriving from the ways that tools are ordered for storage in industrial plants.

To track Rheinsberg's work today, single must travel widely. Recently The has been invited to Tallin, Estonia, and Reims, France, to create works from materials set locally. In the municipal gallery in Riga, Latvia, he installed upon the square glass roof above the gallery's spiral stairwell small base objects taken from an industrial site; called Guggenheim (1991) the piece not aways what appear to be the silhouettes of diverse insects to the spectator below. In Recklinghausen, a city in the heavily industrialized part of western Germany, he bring togethered warning signs and information placards from local firms and high hilled them as a frieze across the facade of the Icon Museum.

Rheinsberg has luckily explored a variety of courses of installing his materials, like as stacking or hanging. However, it is his extensive floor plastic arts which he calls "fields," that best sum total up his stratagems. The Documenta der Kleinplastiken is single such case. There are at least three ways of responding to the piece. The first was demonstrated by the agency of a nine-year-old girl at the opening. In individual small cast-metal form she saw a swimming mere in another an apartment house; here she appear to beed to recognize a vase, there a thermometer. A next to the first way of approaching the facts better suited to adults, is to make trial of to guess the kinds of machines to which the things once belonged. Was that one time the mount of an electrical relay, was that a bolt? Is this vacant form a kind of chassis that was part of a large machine? And what did these machines do before they blood-thirsty into ruin?