Ceramics as an image carrier
The sculptures of Franziska Beilfuß
Anyone who saw the latest exhibition of the painter Franziska Beilfuß during the Berlin Art Week September 2024 experienced a surprise. Not only did she present radiantly coloured large-format oil paintings, there was also a new focus with her extensive series of sculptural works.
This series of works titled Symbionts have an undeniable close connection with the dynamically moving, luminous pictorial worlds of the artist. Her recognisable energetic painterly gesture seems to have detached itself with aplomb from the two-dimensional limitation of the canvas, in order to now also conquer the surrounding space. Sounds of color, visual rhythms, breaks, harmonies and dissonances mix and overlap in order to become matter, to ground themselves, and then create another subtle dimension, in dialogical reference to the paintings. The ubiquitous change is what we also encounter in Beilfuß's painting: The play of light, the breaking up of forms, as well as the tension between calm and drama, upward
movement and the pull of gravity, dissolution and reinvention.
Symbiosis, metaphorical for a successful cross-species relationship, is not only being useful to each other, but the arrangement is usually a question of survival. This existential question is also touched upon in this series of works.
We discover large, modular structures, resting on invisible metal rods, spiraling upwards plant-like, defying gravity, primeval, waiting, remaining silent. In addition, we find enigmatic single objects that resemble fossil finds or skeletal remains, as well as disc-shaped artifacts that remind of archaic planetary models, and not least zoomorphic forms resembling sea creatures swaying gently in an invisible current.
Some of the ceramics have coloured or transparent glazes, while others have been left raw. The diversified relief of the outer skin invites you to scan it in detail, to linger, to immerse yourself. Sometimes the surfaces are sandy, coarse, jagged, porous, blistered or spongy, then again they surprise with fine, mirror-hard surfaces in precious glowing mineral colours.
Now and then you suddenly feel small, like a visitor to an alien planet, a lonely traveler. The impression to feel hard rock, to taste the dust of pigments on the tongue, to hear the crunching sound when the modules rub against each other at the points of contact, appears.
Intimacy Of Strangers 3
glazed stoneware, steel, wood
100 x 50 x 33 cm
2024
If shaped clay is transformed into a ceramic object, elemental forces are at work; fire and air become transformers and creative co-designers, that have a decisive influence on the color result of the glazes used. It is a complicated, seemingly alchemical process, deprived of the views and the immediate influence of the artist.
The peculiar properties of the fired clay as a carrier of images seems more important than any cultural-historical associations. They become a stage on which the spectacle of the colour of the glazes unfold.
The sculptural and painterly works of Franziska Beilfuß are both stimulated by the energy of nature. They reproduce or reflect the living world and its fascinatingly designed forms that are in constant upheaval.
Her work is a patient and persistent questioning of reality. It is concerned with questions of temporality and development, growth and resistance, entanglement and mutual dependence and searches for the principles and processes that take place behind the chaos assumed.
Thus, we become witness of an aesthetic approach to the cosmic enigma surrounding us. We experience an individual way of understanding, beyond science or spirituality. Franziska Beilfuß' art lures us intuitively into an intervening terrain, and what we discover on this journey is quite comforting: it tells of the power, the permanence and the mutability of nature, of inventiveness and ingenuity, of almost inexhaustible creativity and the enormous potential of self-healing.
The author:
Petra Kurek studied art history, literary studies and classical archaeology in Bonn. She lives in Berlin, where she has been working as a freelance translator and editor since 2009.