Carsten Sievers. Stutzen

About

Traditionally, Minimalism seeks to evoke emptiness and a lack of content, to relax the viewer’s gaze, and to produce a “total identity as object”, as the American art theoretician Rosalind Krauss once put it. Without opening himself up to the discourse rhetoric that accompanies today’s debates about the Minimalist legacy, Carsten Sievers playfully inscribes himself in this tradition with his works.

But at the same time, he charges his works with an auratic depth that works in the opposite direction. Sievers’ oeuvre is based on the artistic activities of folding, layering, and cutting and on the idea of an opulent seriality that carries the Minimalist aesthetic forward and simultaneously locates it in real life.
The exhibition “STUTZEN” brings together pieces from two new work groups. These works trigger thoughts about the title word’s double meaning in German: to be suddenly consternated and to trim.

Carsten Sievers thereby takes up the Minimalist aesthetic as a matter of course. His objects recall the legacy of Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Donald Judd, and Eva Hesse and, without directly referring to this legacy, play with the fact that it has already powerfully entered our visual subconscious. The works are not homages, quotations, or satires. Instead, they exude an unusual spirit of irreverence and freedom.

Text by Daniel Schreiber
Translation by Mitch Cohen