FOOTPRINTS . RESIDUES . SEDIMENTS
Exhibition of sculpture
May 30 • June 30, 2019
Hugo Wirz
Czili
Curator: Zvonimir Kremenić
Hugo Wirz, Brugg (Switzerland), 1948
He visits several European countries and collaborates with various Swiss visual artists, such as Otto Kälin, Albert Siegenthaler, Ilse Weber, Gillian White and Eva Wipf. In the seventies, he traveled to Cameroon ,where awakening in his great sensitivity towards vital expressions.And he reflected it in his works.
After traveling to Cameroon, between 1975 and 1978, he continues his studies about nature, where he discovered that the objects he drew were revealed as symbols, recalling the reflections of the 80s and 90s on magical realism. In Cameroon, he was fascinated by the braided drawings, and discovered that the way up and down is subject to cycles, becoming the spiral. It is observed from above or below, it forms a circle that closes after each stage, but watched from the outside. It changes the height, the level and it never remains in the same place, its meaning changes.
Hugo Wirz expressed in the abstract way, but almost always with an underlying idea, a reminiscence of nature. It is also the nature element, with spirituality and deep beauty, that articulates the works of Czili, a Taiwanese artist-in-residence in Spring 9, who also shares space in this exhibition.
Hugo change the surfaces towards reliefs and abstract sculptures in wood appear. These show the footprint of nature, the worms that make their way through the interior of the trunk of a fallen tree, the erosion produced by the elements, with capricious but organic shapes, the sinuosity of the curved line, or the fossil footprints of the waves of the sea present in several of his works. Interpretation in sculpted wood of the sediments that the movement of water has imprinted on the rock over millions of years.
Continue from the relief to the sculpture so that the various sides can be observed all the time. Each different angle start other possibilities, reveals movement that could allow you to see the changes and perspectives of the perforations shown from the inside.
It is the course of the lines, the edges of the depths and elevations, which continually sway on the grid, which propose to the observer, when his position changes, to appreciate much better the flow of movement from one side to the other, smooth, almost poetic.
The works made with paper and collected branches, plant residues,with the purity of the white color as a liberator of the visual element, allow us to perceive the triangular geometries in a reticular, almost fractal shape. These forms are what take us to their dream universes, manifestations of their vivid dreams and expression of pure formal and conceptual beauty.
Even today, the look inward has not lost its importance and constitutes a determining element in their work.
“Many of my works are residues of my dreams, images that I want to take from an unconscious place (absolutely individual) to make them visible, to seek an explanation for the perhaps inexplicable.”
Hugo Wirz
Curator: Zvonimir Kremenić and P9
