SITTING GROUP

    2015/2016

    Cement mortars, steel, plaster

    TEXT by Thomas Pöhler

    The monoliths, the skeleton of the concrete, protrude from the stumps of the seated as the springy prostheses of a legatied athlete. There is a

    torso in the hip, as if the pants were too wide and the shape of a large closed shell. This upper body of two casts of a back turns away from us

    - from the front as from the rear. Or two people have pushed each other so much that they merge into a single figure. Amalgamated to such an

    independent form, she could no longer separate one another, return her arms, breasts, bellies, and thus her independence. It is a Siamese twin

    shape, which has encapsulated its interior in the tank before the world.

   

   Anne Wissmann's studio has for some time the appearance of a prosthesis laboratory or a knight for armor. The artist had copied many parts of

    the body with gypsum, and for months these plaster fragments of the abdomen with chest and shoulder, of legs and back were combined again

    and again. From this kit, anatomies that raise questions are growing.

    When do we begin to recognize a human being in compound limbs? The iron rod protruding from the incomplete leg-is it part of the human form?

    Is finitere to be understood as a metaphor of the circumstances of life that impress upon the individual his form and attitude, his essence? Has

    man become a furniture in Kafkaesque transformation? The sculpture thus suddenly becomes a useful value for the world and is no longer just an

    aesthetic object: "Can I sit down?" - "But you do not sit down on a human being!" Two steps further, and these reflections vanish in a new

    one Impression. Paradoxically, the back of the figure offers the forehead to the viewer.

    A small inclined face mask crowns "sitting 2", which is otherwise composed of the same building blocks as "sitting 1". With the difference

    that here the leg stumps lie below the figure, serve as a furniture foot, and close the S-curve of the freischwinger. The legs were shifte by half a turn.

    Invisible above these legs grows the upper body of a second woman (can one avoid imagining this air sculpture?). She kneels

    in humility before the seated, who looks down to her in the mirror. A gun, a request for forgiveness. A pair of figures that tells of grief

    and comfort. Two figures, which in their bodies and their feelings inseparably merge into a unity. What if such an anatomy tried to rise?

    The joints, which would help man and beast to exercise and freedom, would make it impossible for this figure to stand up and to stand

    upright. You can feel how it would collapse. For the attitude which the artist has thought of her figure is the only one in which she can stand.