Max Sudues "Fear of Falling" @ Galerie Christian Lethert

image:Max Sudhues // Fear of Falling // installation view, 2010 // Galerie Christian Lethert

MAX SUDUES // FEAR OF FALLING // June 5, 2010 until July 17, 2010 // Galerie Christian Lethert // Cologne

In a second solo exhibition called Fear of Falling, Galerie Christian Lethert will be showing both recent and the very newest works by Max Sudhues, an artist who lives in Berlin. The title is a playful, and playfully ironic, reference to the neurotic fear we have of falling again after we have already fallen once.

Using Loops of "found" video tape recordings of everyday occurrences, which he then alienates minimally using digital means, Sudhues examines the formal characteristics of everyday situations and transforms random events (defective pipes spewing water at a construction site, a platform anchored in Hamburg Harbor) into small stories of human wear and tear, of attraction and repulsion.

In installations and projection works consisting of objects lit up to enhance their shadows, the artist comes up with allegorical, sometimes stirring worlds of pictures which, though man is absent from them, nevertheless indicate his actions and his standards in a field of tension spanning emotion, technology and nature.

In his works, Max Sudhues examines the simplest of things with respect to their surface, form and structure - and, what is more, checks them for new correlations of content by bringing them together with the techniques of light projection long thought to be outmoded (such as overhead and slide projections): Netting left over from oranges and lemons, but also rubber mats and halves of plastic eggs suddenly want to tell their own spatial stories in new combinations. In this way, and in contrast to the modest, minimal means of what seems to be nothing, neglected things, and things that have been discarded, projections of meaningful(l) pictures and symbols made of light, material and their shadows now grow, always staged in reference to the surrounding space.

"To the viewer, who surrenders himself to the interplay between and light and shadows in this space-dominating work, a spark of poetry comes across, although the means of this interplay - the overhead projector, digital projector, and everyday object - are strikingly present and just as visible as the projections themselves. As integral components of all of Sudhues's works, production and perception, construction and deconstruction, illusion and disillusion enter into an exciting interrelationship.

With its multiple levels of meaning and visual surprises, Max Sudhues's collaged course of projections has been conceived as an APPROXIMATELY INFINITE UNIVERSE, as Yoko Ono once sang of it in 1973, as one of the artist's most recent works is called. "
(Sara Stehr)

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