File Note 100: Florian Roithmayr

Solidity and durability are misleading properties, as sculpture, just as anything in the world, is subject to both wilful and unintentional change. Even the most precious of antiquities are defenceless against the vicissitudes of human history. In 2011, the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, and only in the past months, ISIS hacked to bits countless examples of statuary in Syria. An act of care can also alter the state of a sculpture, as in the case of Martin Kippenberger’s Wenn’s anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen (1987). While on view at the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund, a cleaner mistook a paint-splattered part of the installation as unintentional and scrubbed it clean, forever altering the work. One person’s idea of repair is to another an act of violence. Earlier this year, the artist Cady Noland disowned her Log Cabin Blank With Screw Eyes and Cafe Door (1990) claiming the work as irreversibly transformed, when its rotting wooden parts were replaced without her knowledge or consent. Nature, the most pervasive of forces, also shapes, or rather misshapes, sculpture, with earthworks such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) serving as a prime example. A monumental winding coil that jets out into the waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Spiral Jetty is gradually becoming discoloured and weathered, making the issue of its preservation paramount – whether to conserve the work, or let it gradually disintegrate.

Although made mostly of industrial materials, such as concrete, rubber and steel, Florian Roithmayr’s sculptures allude less to technology or machinery, and more to the natural world. Scattered across the gallery floor, the ridged, globe-shaped spheres of Adoration recall the form of fruit and vegetables, while Strike resembles coral and fossilised natural specimens (both 2015). Sized to the human frame, many of the elements of Roithmayr’s sculptures approximate human forms – a shoulder, knee or forearm. Placed within the body’s reach, and of highly tactile textures, their surfaces entice touch. While some are singular objects, others are made of several elements slung together, suspended from a wall, leaning or resting atop one another. Rarely fixed in place, one piece holds the next, with the pressure between the parts forming a whole. Through balance and tension, Roithmayr’s materials enter into dependencies, relationships and coincidences, acutely suggested by the exhibition’s very title – with, and, or, without.

Roithmayr has continued to rearrange and accumulate works on public view, positing on the exhibition as a growing process. For Matter of Engagement at Site Gallery in Sheffield (2014), Roithmayr worked as an apprentice to a ‘concrete beautician’, a technician who specialises in repairing cracking building façades. Over the course of two weeks, the master craftsman and Roithmayr worked on what appeared like a substantial layer of seamless concrete on an existing wall. Audiences were free to view the exhibition throughout the time of construction, and no photographs of the completed wall were taken. Each person’s experience of Matter of Engagement differed, depending on the stage at which they visited the exhibition. Some might have mistaken the space for a dust-filled building site, while others might have been puzzled by a seemingly emptied contemporary art gallery with nothing on view. In purposefully refraining from photographic documentation, Roithmayr lodged the future legacy of Matter of Engagement within hearsay and personal recollection, destined to be corrupted and fictionalised by the fallacy of human memory.

Just as exhibition making offers Roithmayr the possibility of gradually renouncing control, so too does the very act of making a sculpture. While many of his works are prescribed by what already exists in the studio, others allow the innate properties of materials to dictate their ultimate form. The plinth-based, window sized concrete Fermata (2015) and Strike play upon the relationship between the amorphous and distinctly shaped, the hollow and full. The result of chance, these sculptures are made by combining expanding foam and concrete within wooden cases. As the two struggle against one another, they eventually settle and cure, giving way to a form beyond Roithmayr’s planning. Unseen by the artist until the very moment of installing the exhibition, these sculptures are taken from their moulds directly in the gallery space and presented however settled, without any additional adjustments or alterations. While hinging upon Roithmayr’s acceptance of their final form, shape and appearance, Fermata and Strike are already part of events and forces that escape the artist’s control. To see Roithmayr’s work is to be reminded that sculpture, although solid and weighty, is never fixed nor finished, but always part of on-going changes and movements, some serendipitous and others deliberate.