Absalon

Text by Giuditta Vendrame

KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin hosts the first solo exhibition of the Israeli artist Absalon, died at the age of 28 years old in 1993.
White and abstract volumes characterize the four floors of the exhibitions. Absalon examines the space through the disposition and organization of basic and elementary volumes, with which he created living cellules, designed and built starting from the body measures of the artist himself as in the case of Cellules. Many are the analogies between the work of Absalon and the modernist architecture, but what is striking the most it is the freedom of creation of these spaces without any feasibility and functional limits.

Absalons’ works remind of the childhood. They remind of the freedom to assemble and play with volumes and shapes. Dispositions, on the third floor of the exhibition recalls to the playful constructions of Froebel. If we look to the materials, we find the wood, the cardboard, the fabric, all painted in white. This abstraction recalls in turn to the tree houses, the cardboard and wood house: possible spaces in which shelter our self and interact with our body and the external world.
Cellules on the ground floor are designed by the artist as individual spaces to be collocated in public spaces of six big cities: Paris, Zurich, New York, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. They have been thought not as forms of isolation, but as tools for “living the social”, in this sense they play with limit between the private and public sphere. The works of the artist are praise to the pleasure to assemble, compose and experiment. Being far a way from the logics of what is possible, functional and ergonomic, what is wining is the atavistic need to build shelters, protections, concave and convex spaces, in which to assemble again other volumes.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art A
uguststraße 69
D-10117 Berlin
www.kw-berlin.de