What I have experienced in Kirsten Ortwed’s studio is something similar. Her works are, as one says, abstract, but cannot be reduced to neither form nor material. They are not representational, yet reach beyond their purely physical properties. Kirsten Ortwed’s works are, when looked at, surrounded by a layer of space, a by the modelling modelled layer, which furnishes a description of the sculpture, of the peceived. A sculpture by Kirsten Ortwed comes about step by step as a series of perceptions and the changes they undergo, and in this sense one might say it sets up a mirror in space in which perception perceives itself. I shall here confine myself to the mere experience of the work and not elaborate it theoretically, although it would touch quite a few interesting points. But perhaps I have indicated where the source of the forceful vitality lies – a vitality without which a work of art is nothing.
This leads me to another perspective of which I wasn’t aware until recently and which I found in the writings of Frank Stella. Stella occupies himself in several articles with some phenomena in contemporary art and criticises what he calls their “literalness”. By this he means works of art that are principally not different from everyday objects and function along the same patterns as these, art, that is – that’s how he describes the situation – that no longer takes place in an illusionistic space, that doesn’t try to reach beyond itself, where aesthetic quality exhausts itself in design and where “Grandeur” is an unknown word. […] Read More
Here lies the significance of Kirsten Ortwed today: She shows it can be done differently, that it is possible to make art by constantly inventing everything oneself. That’s difficult but therefore more important than ever. Is it worthwhile to occupy oneself with art that doesn’t depend on imagination and inventiveness? No art “says” as much about itself as handmade art: only here can we read off what hasn’t succeeded. Only where errors may occur can, conversely, something be “right”. […] That art is a sketch for itself is in principle what determines that it of its own, so to speak, carries meaning and it is what creates its semantic space. That’s why Kirsten Ortwed’s work, in relation to the contemporary mainstream, is radical. It doesn’t just produce an object in space, it builds the space that the sculpture takes up so that the semantic reach it creates comprizes itself. In a text, ‘Lenhard Holschuh’, Frank Stella writes how it became possible with modern sculpture to draw in space – but how Holschuh has managed to paint with steel in space. When I now think of the painting by Zorn I was often reminded of in Kirsten Ortwed’s studio I would say: She has managed to paint with space.1
