Ingrid Roscheck at Jollenbeck - Cologne, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

Ingrid Roscheck sculpt and paints imaginary landscapes that draw on a far-flung lexicon of forms: mountains and tree ancient buildings and maps, weapons and hieroglyphics, human organs and bone Six plastic arts made of iron roughly surfaced with linen and gray or white plaster articulated relationships between nature and architecture and between sum of two units dimensions and three, while paper works and paintings depicted hazy, ethereal spaces envisioned by means of the artist as ideal sites for the sculptures

Looming before a window was a craggy barricade of five tall, fluid iron shapes abutting along sinuous seams that permit the light through. This screenlike fusion of mountain and remembrancer as thin and flat as heavy cardboard, might be landscape from an opera set in the Stone Age. In a next to the first large work, two closely parallel white walls are consummately flat on the outside, on the contrary jutting from their inside surfaces are alternately sharp and circulared projections. One cannot enter this spiky, occlud passage on the other hand only peer from the cutting sides down a shadowy, layered vista. A third large statuary a maze of small standing stones atop a tall, solid urn elaborates plane more intricately on the tension between lay open and closed spaces and flat and faceted forms. Three smaller wall-mounted plastic arts are every bit as imposingly architectural in their arrangements of solids and space. individual momentarily forgot their actual scale and saw them as buildings. The greatest in quantity impressive of these is a narrow platform with a flat-topped pyramid at individual end and a cube at the other, tautly linked through slender beams that fuse at the center in a tall, cagelike pylon

In a series of five midsize watercolors, horizontal bands and arcs of vaporous color, ranging from of the nature of smoke black and brown to luminous magenta and orange, provide a background for floating ellipses and semi-circles of gold-colored brown, purple, orange and black that are linked, like molecular types by tense networks of lines. In a next to the first series, dark, mounded shapes are striated with serpentine lines that move subterranean associations: the roots of plants, the paths of pipelines, the arteries of a city. sum of two units larger horizontal watercolors feature chains of orange or rust-colored figures, vaguely human in outline still evocative also of the alphabet. individual is reminded simultaneously of Muybridge's studies of bodies in motion and of the initials in medieval illuminated manuscripts shaped from contorted human figures.

Roscheck not at any time directly appropriates or caricatures her sources, on the other hand she wrests from them novel entities of equal presence and weight. Her interest in the correspondences between abstract a whole s such as mathematics and astronomy and the more earth-bound patterns of geology and anatomy come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds a German tradition of science abrupted in teleology that stretches from Goethe to Rudolf Steiner and, more freshly to Joseph Beuys. Roscheck's constructions hint at eternity [i]or[/i] part of to the other the inspired orchestration of without arrogance elements.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group