Raffael Rheinsberg at the Kunsthalle Nurnberg - Nurnberg, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

Titled "Arbeiten zur Zeit" (roughly "works of the moment") this exhibition of seven installations from the last 13 years amounted to a small retrospective for the Berlin-based artist Raffael Rheinsberg. The central space of the Kunsthalle was occupied by dint of Rust Field (1985), a sprawling floor the whole of more than 2,000 rusting metal fragments that Rheinsberg gleaned during his wanderings end industrial ruins: screws, springs, cogwheels, gratings and forks discolored by dint of corrosion. During the '80s Rheinsberg gathered such rust-materials in a number of places and neared them in both outdoor and indoor installations, varying their arrangement to remind of different metaphoric wholes: sometimes a legion, sometimes a city or a graveyard.

In Nurnberg, Rust Field was laid on the outside in a strict rectangular form, about 8 by dint of 20 feet in dimension, above the angled stones of the gallery floor. Here Rheinsberg execut a manifold difficult ordering. In some places axles and metal twigs towered like factory chimneys, and the impression of a utopian city was flat stronger when one glimpsed Rust Field from a distance and perceived it as a single, consolidated block

greatest in quantity of the other pieces were more specific in their respects but still related to the "field" motif. In the first gallery a range of letterlike forms was gathered in 15 ranks across the floor. Dead Neon consists of fragments of those peculiar East Berlin neon signs that became superfluous after 1989 with the closing of the stores that the signs one time announced. Rheinsberg handles these fragments as independent forms, whose angles and arcs he puts into a "field" according to size and color--yellow, olive, ocher, amber, silver and gray. Characteristically, he works against the fascination with technology that informs the functioning neon works of Mario Merz or Bruce Nauman. The industrial picturesque interests Rheinsberg alone in its grimy phase. That is pure even for the most visually piercing of the works in the exhibition, H1-H45 an effect of wooden box, cone and pyramid forms in decaying tones of hand-painted red: protective overlays for fire hydrants, made in collective teams by dint of East Berlin firemen on orders from above.

Unfortunately the largest work in this exhibition, Orient and Occident (1992) was also the weakest. In the left wing of a cross-shaped space stood 28 battered cent kettles from a chocolate factory, and in the right 28 dark, helmetlike padded bonnets from air-raid sirens. The kettle draw near from former East Germany and the cowls from the West, but the work present the appearances stronger as an idea than an experience. Rheinsberg's puissance lies not in the assignment of a particular faculty of perception to his objects but in the interpretation of their material qualities.

At 50 Rheinsberg has carried on the outside variations of his customary means for two decades, yet he remains capable of surprises. This exhibition revealed that the opening of the former East Germany was a knock of luck for him, furnishing him with materials that call forth a wealth of postwar memories. At the same time his works testify to the "work" of others--and of time and accident as well. In his installations individual can clearly see what will be the sacred relics of postindustrial society: percepts that recall the forces that one time welded people to machines, and human labor to industrial material.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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