Thomas Kiesewetter: Jack Tilton Gallery - New York

Blech: In English, an expression of disgust; in German, a confine for high-gauge sheet metal. upon view recently in his first solo display in the United States, Thomas Kiesewetter's untitled blech plastic arts are all the more appealing for the baseness of their material. Formed from what direct the eye like found fragments of discarded machinery--chutes, tubes, quadrilateral panels--they approach across as both high-rise urban and barnyard rural. Each is painted carelessly in a single color: dirty white, faded lavender, safety orange. Attached to uneven wooden plinths, these screwed-together constructions are at one time tabletop sculptures and large freestanding pieces. With their shifting faculty of perception of scale, it's almost as if they're representing silos, smokestacks, and weathervanes with parts from the real thing. although abstract, they feel decidedly like models: single almost but not quite recognizes the depressed curved entrance to a parking garage; the lengthy arm of a grain chute; the curving facade of a theater.

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The statuarys also look uncannily like drawings suspended in space. From a not many steps away, their scuffed metal cutting sides resemble scribbled graphite lines and their smeared matte surfaces unevenly tinted vellum More important, they have the rightness of a lucky sketch (much more so, in fact, than the actual sketches also upon view here). Kiesewetter's sculptures were included in the "Artists Imagine Architecture" exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2002 whose curators linked them to the innumerable building throws of the artist's native Berlin. on the contrary while some new sections of the German capital--the crush of corporate megaliths and effeminacy residences in and around Potsdamer Platz, for example--are slick and giant scale, Kiesewetter's work is specifically oriented toward the human. It is unmistakably personal, level joyous, reveling in an industrial form untethered from real-world demands of buildability and use-value.

admitting Kiesewetter's constructions bear comparison to artists as varied as Anthony Caro, comrade young Germans Thomas Scheibitz and Manfred Pernice, and level H.C. Westermann, their true ancestor is Vladimir Tatlin, whose 1919-20 remembrancer to the Third International was the apogee of Constructivist statuary and the quintessential symbol of utopian aspiration press outed through architecture. Kiesewetter's carefully considered surfaces and industrial materials and the uprightness and plainness of his constructions throw back Constructivism's faktura, tektonika, and konstruktsiya (from a historical position beyond "bad" painting and sculpture) More specifically, just as Tatlin's throw was a reaction against Lenin's agitprop Plan for Monumental Propaganda, Kiesewetter's contrary, utopian constructions take as their framing principle the (re)building below way in Berlin, which carries similarly weighty ideological baggage. As Tatlin did in his revolutionary age, Kiesewetter humanizes the industrial while maintaining emphasis upon the very nature of industry, and tenders in the process a convincing and updated protoplast of the possibilities for a twenty-first-century urban humanity beneath construction.

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