Installation view


The Suzy Shammah gallery presents the first Italian solo exhibition of the German sculptor Wilhelm Mundt (Grevenbroich, 1959). The exhibition is dedicated to the corpus Trashstones and traces its development from the early Nineties to the present time. Mundt's stones are the outcome of a complex procedure, which begins from the random assembly of "waste" accumulated in the artist's studio. Coated with sheets of fibreglass and various layers of coloured polyester, the amorphous volumes are then smoothed to bring out the underlying colour. Over the years, Mundt has constantly modified the appearance of the stones, evolving from matt and scarcely coloured surfaces, typical of his early work, up to the bright and brilliant chromatic nuances of his latest work. A variant to this protocol are the cast aluminium stones with a "trashstone core" and a shiny surface that reflects and deforms the surrounding space as a mirror. All Mundt's Trashstones are marked by a progressive number alluding to industrial production mechanisms and suggesting a reflection on the value of the artistic process.

The best way of describing his method is to consider it as a natural combination of form and material. By revealing the creative potential inherent in trash, Mundt demonstrates that the continual cycle of waste production generates an infinite number of sculptural inventions and revaluates the artistic process. In this context, Mundt's sculptures elude any traditional principle of identification of an artistic form, whilst subtracting it from the aesthetics of ready-made objects.