Georg Zey at Vincenz Sala - sculpture - Berlin, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

BERLIN

Zey's first major showing took place sum of two units years ago at Berlin's Galerie Vier. It featured sculptural works which may be familiar to American viewers who saw the Corcoran Gallery's "Interface" exhibition of contemporary Berlin art. Using glass marbles, Ping-Pong balls, wire, rubber preserve-jar seals and fired bits of ceramics, Zey bent, braided and glu his statuarys These belonged to two main formal types: the perforated container--often no more than a net--and the proliferating scaffold conformation In these works, fragility was played against elasticity, expansiveness against containment, and enclos convolution against the form that defines it.

The greatest in quantity striking of Zey's more new works is an untitled monstrosity that occupied the main sweep at Vincenz Sala: an insistently gray statuary more than 6 feet tall, whose rail-like branching arms extreme point in bulging gray protuberances. These swelling nodules form the "feet" upon which the sculpture stands and also a number of "heads," lending the work a distinctly dragonlike air. The biological allusion is reinforced through the fact that the nodule clusters sculpturally replicate a schematic drawing of a tree in replete bloom. But the allusion was simultaneously undermined through the way that the work's linear simple bodys were placed in parallel with the gallery's walls. The artificial and the creaturely are gazeed in combat: scaffold and tree machine and animal.

A sign in the gallery window jokingly warned, "Caution! Don't touch! Shaky sculpture!" Of course it was impossible to resist touching this massy work, with its precisely portioned rails and its perfect, gleaming nodules. Ye it tottered a bit: the whole work is made of PVC and evinces considerably lighter than it appears. This, too, present the appearances to be part of a conscious strategy of sending conflicting signals to the observer

If this statuary is Zey's largest example to date of the proliferating scaffold, its smaller pendant is a performed container: an almost parodically unassuming black rubber piece, pierced by the agency of multiple holes, that is meant to hang languidly from a nail upon the wall. Stretched out, it has the form of a vase or a football. This hand-torn rubber work could be seen in a smaller rear compass of the gallery, into which visitors to the closing "finissage" pressed; apparently the company of the larger cluster-creature was unpropitious for revelry

That an artist as promising as Zey exhibited in like relatively modest surroundings speaks for the continuing absence of a real art market in Berlin, and also for the lethargy of the city's art institutions. In the coming month Zey will be showing examples of his new work at two noncommercial venue in southern Germany--one of the small in number means available today for serviceable young Berlin artists to finance a catalogue.

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