LINE FORM PAPER Eberhard Freudenreich

23.03. - 29.04.2017

The first paper finds in China date back to 140 B.C., but it was a long way before paper became widespread in Europe in the 13th century. Today, it is impossible to imagine everyday life without it. Everyone uses it every day, and global consumption in 2015 was 440 million tons, and rising. But I don't want to bore you with facts about the history of paper. Instead, I would like to introduce you this evening to an artist who gives this material almost sole status in his work - Eberhard Freudenreich. I had the pleasure of getting to know Eberhard Freudenreich and his art better at the beginning of the year. In his Stuttgart studio, large-format prints were piled up, folded paper elements dangled from the ceiling, streamlined drawings hung on the wall. Paper was omnipresent. He prints, paints, and folds it. The accompanying component is always the line, which already enters his work with the study of graphics. In most printing techniques it is the forming element. Depending on the process, the incised furrows and strokes create surfaces that in turn define a form. This approach to printmaking can be seen as a fundamental principle for Freudenreich's work. Although the line seems to be the simplest pictorial element in art, Freudenreich succeeds in overcoming the conventions that have been imposed on the line for centuries in the two-dimensional plane. He takes it further into space. This development runs constantly through Freudenreich's work. Initially, he creates the line through cuts; the resulting edges already have a three-dimensional character here. Through layered papers, which the artist draws onto glass plates and brings into the horizontal in so-called sliding boxes, he already detaches himself from the plane. Here, the viewer also plays an important role. By moving in front of the works, he could already influence them through the play of light and shadow. Now he can change the different levels of the glass plates with his hands and create different insights and views. Freudenreich goes one step further into space with the cut shapes; these are now all-around and connected with a connecting piece as if in a kind of modular system. They now have the typical multiple-view quality of a sculpture. From here, the step to the hovering birds, originally created for an art-in-architecture project, doesn't seem far. Here in Mannheim, they are not trapped under a glass roof, as initially planned, but hover filigree above the terrace in the branches of the linden tree. This is the starting point for his current paper foldings, or "additions," as he has come to call them. Volume is created by folding individual modules that he sticks together. In the process, Freudenreich leaves open whether he will expand the form at some point. In general, he sees his works and groups of works as open and not completed. Particularly with the three-dimensional objects, figurative associations come to the viewer's mind, although the artist himself does not intend them. Currently, parallel to the additions, Freudenreich also returns to the plane by tracing the edges of his paper forms with pencils or colored pencils. The vocabulary of forms for this consists of four biomorphic-looking shapes that he trims, varies in size, or reproduces, and which can be recognized again and again in his work. The superimpositions of the various lines, which he meticulously creates through offsets, give the so-called edge drawings a three-dimensional character. Freudenreich's experiment with line, form and paper thus seems to be far from complete, and we are already looking forward to further developments. On the one hand, I would like to recommend the catalog published for the exhibition. I would also like to draw your attention to the workshop with Eberhard Freudenreich that will take place the day after tomorrow. It is entitled "Corners and Edges" and will take place in cooperation with the Verein für Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung Rhein-Neckar e.V. (Rhine-Neckar Association for Art and Cultural Education) on Saturday here from 2 pm. Registrations are still possible tonight, please contact us.

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