Cedric Christie – Andreas Exner

Andreas Exner

Andreas Exner, Gelber Rock / Yellow Skirt , 2013 farbric,zip, pins

to elevate nothing into something…. The work of Andreas Exner

Face to face with a work from Andreas Exner I see nothing but the Thing itself (das Ding an sich) … and so encounter something beyond that which I see. There’s the object that it is … and what it points to beyond… 

A dark green triangle of woollen fabric insists that I come closer and enquire of it. What are you? Why are you like that? As such, we are in the realm of human desire – wanting to know something about another being. 

A filled-in surface of mute colour makes me smile but I don’t know what the joke is. Openings that are filled in: containers that are satisfyingly full to the brim. They are full only with their own materiality, their own matter – a silent interior. 

There is nothing there. There is nothing.

It’s the nothing, this little no-thing that we hold so dear, because it’s always there. Always there but also hidden. An artwork shows this Thing by elevating a little nothing into something grand: it takes any old thing and transforms it into something with dignity, transforms it into something sublime, perhaps. 

You might think old clothes, large underpants and toilets are undignified, but in the care of Exner they convey a transcendence that comes from the human subjects, the bodies, they infer or index. There is a substantial kindness at work here, a kindness that tolerates the abject, the refused, the disliked: the sort of kindness we need in the world these days.

I see the stuff of Exner and I feel myself: the coloured works map my body and soul. These works are a writing, and as such are intrinsically social, knitting together the symbolic of language and the real beyond. See there… the word sozial made soft and limp, holes into a patchwork curtain so that it shows its own underbelly. And there… a skirt once worn around a woman’s waist – now a majestic site. And here, the common automobile injected with uplifting colour into the open windows: such an act transforms the suburban street into a venue of mysterious and playful interaction, and transforms the ordinary object, an object of daily commerce and industry, into a Thing of love. 

It’s social work: empowering the nothings so that we might have desire for life.

Lizzy Newman 2006

Cedric Christie

When I look at a Judd, I see a question. 

That’s what they were doing then: asking questions like “Could this be a sculpture or is it just an object?” 

So how do you ask those questions now? How do you ask the same questions but in a different context? It’s a bit like politics.

Two hundred years ago, someone had the idea to abolish slavery, and through politics, changes were made. Now, in the present day, I can ask the questions “How am I benefiting from the change? – how have those changes made an impact?” 

Excerpt  from an interview with Katrina Blannin /  MASS Sculpture Magazine, Issue 2, 2023