O | A Kassen

About

The brass and bronze sculptures, belonging to the Pours series, are shown for the first time in Spain after having been conceived as site-specific projects in/at KØS and Aarhus, Denmark, and in Kistefomuseet, Norway. The contact of hot liquid metal, at 1000º C, and cold water causes the bronze to solidify in little unique models of abstract and organic random shapes; afterwards those are cast on a larger scale.  

The resulting shapes are the outcome of an incontrollable natural phenomenon in which water, metal and its different temperatures and conditions take part. In A Kassen’s work, processes always play an important role. In fact, the title, Pour, refers to the process itself, since it literally indicates the action of pouring a substance. In this case, the process is an instant chemical reaction with a performative ingredient where the uncontrollable, the unpredictable and chance take part. 

All Pours are linked to modern and avant-garde history of art, due both to its abstract and amorphous forms and to the creative process: Umberto Boccioni, Robert Smithson, Jean Arp, Henry Moore and Richard Serra are some of the references. Sculpture is not linked to one single context anymore, and it drifts apart from its symbolic and monumental characteristics. 

Whereas the sculptures are shaped in a flick of a moment the series Exposure are the result of more than 25 years of exposure to light.

Transformation processes, chance and insertion into an artistic context, are ideas that persist in the works titled Exposure. These papers served as mounting paper for photographs in glass frames/framing in a wellknown museum in New York. During several decades light has changed the color of the paper, so the silhouettes of the photographs has been marked on the paper. By exhibiting only these papers, we can make out the traces left over time, as the then poorly framed photographs has displaced within the frames throughout the years (due to small earthquakes and/or the subway vibrations), the very absence of the photographs suggests their presence, taking up the place they once occupied. 

In the work titled View from below A Kassen’s artistic approach of displacing objects becomes very distinct. Two classical statues are placed horizontally through the wall. The visible part in the exhibition space is the underneath of the sculpture, which is normally unseen, breaking with the traditional way of observing a sculpture. The “nobel” part of the sculpture is only visible if the private area of the gallery is entered. This brings up a reflection on the limits between the spheres, public and private, in which art falls within.