Practicing sculptor and long-term professor of sculpture also most recently founder of the Uckermark’s new forum for contemporary art, The Stallmuseum in Groß Fredenwalde, Inge Mahn turns 70 this autumn. To mark the event, how does this prolific creative force choose to celebrate? With an exhibition, of course.
Inge Mahn’s fourth solo exhibition at the Emerson Gallery Berlin, entitled “Canon” serves as a compact retrospective of four decades of her artistic output. Unbroken by walls and doors, the gallery’s airy single presentation room on the bank’s of the River Spree provides ample space for long unseen work to appear in a discourse with new work created specifically for this retrospective.
“Canon”: The term is as multifaceted as Mahn’s work. Seeing the works in close proximity to each other is telling: The viewer is left with an impression of the continuity evident in very diverse individual works. Already while still a very young artist in her twenties participating at the legendary documenta 5, Inge Mahn has been continuously developing her own very individual pictorial language.
Common features recur like an infectious musical motif: the frequent and sensitive use of plaster, molded into simple geometric forms or everyday objects, occasional highlights of light and sound. An enormous table surrounded with equally enormous but vertical monoliths. Towers that stretch into the heights. With closer consideration it becomes striking how absent living figures are. The work is stripped of potential narrative, allegorical or otherwise symbolic elements. Simply standing for itself on its own terms is actually the source of the expressive power of these sculptures and objects and the viewer is encouraged to experience the objects presented unburdened by disruptive interpretive baggage.
With one more look, the result can even seem subversive. By creating objects which speak for themselves, Inge Mahn turns her back on trends, fashion, and fleeting fads. She invites and offers the viewer the freedom to linger.
