Timo Klöppel ."Das Ewige Treiben"

About

25 roses. The artist is growing them in his garden. The garden of a countryside house- and studio in Neulewin, Oderbruch. Geologically speaking Oderbruch is situated in a Urstromtal (a broad glacial valley) formed by meltwater of the last ice age.

The eternal drifting. Ideas, material, ideas, material. The tools of the sculptor. Timo Klöppel (*1981 in Berlin) is one of the most genuine sculptors whom I have ever acquainted. He is literally a Bildhauer. He adds and removes material and positions it, for us to see or feel its presence. He creates with an immense energy; he drifts with his visions.

As one might remember from his soloexhibiton NACHTMEERFAHRTEN in the former gallery space of KWADRAT in 2015, Klöppel crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo sailing ship in 2014-15. The crew of this journey is not visible in this exhibition, but another one is. A crew consisting of 13 persons with Fridtjof Nansen in charge of the expedition. They are looking out at us from a shimmering silver wall, the single portraits painted with aquarelle, ink and collage. Constructed for this journey, the ship Fram took off on the expedition, planned not really to sail - but to drift through the ice of the Arctic Ocean with the goal of being the first to reach the geographical North Pole. The crew travelled in the ship over three years (1893-96), enclosed but also carried by drift ice, they never actually reached their goal.

Before starting to write this text, I asked the artist: what would you like to say with this exhibition? He looked up from a crate full of tomatoes he grew in his greenhouse this summer, he said:

• Ich will nichts sagen, ich will etwas zeigen.
• Was zeigen?
• Ein großes Experiment.

In Das Ewige Treiben, we are invited inside this experiment entering through a roof; here the sculptor presents us to his paintings, photography, a stone collection; to become a part of it and dream along or drift ashore.

Standing here myself, side by side with the polar explorer Hjalmer Johansen (1867-1913), I suddenly think of the quote ‘… Only through each other can we live and breathe, and no-one creates alone…’, by the Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov-Mancoba. Had I not remembered that she wrote this in a letter to an art historian in 1979, I would have claimed that the artist had whispered it to me in a dream.

Text: Ellen Martine Heuser, September 2023