Kirstin Arndt. ottendorf, germany, 1961. lives and works IN karlsruhe, germany.

artists website: www.kirstin-arndt.com

Arndt is represented by galerie mathias güntner, Hamburg, germany, GREEN ON RED GALLERY, Dublin, Ireland, Galerie Kim Behm, Mannheim, germany.

Arndt brings to her mixture of sharp and flowing industrial materials a predilection for clean and colourful forms, at times inviting the viewer to interact with or even to recompose her work. Her sculptures, made from a wide variety of readily available industrial materials, fold, bend, fall or crease in space depending on the support or the effects of gravity on her limp or resistant forms.

Ralf Christofori has written how Arndt has a very keen sense of the aesthetic in everyday things. She searches for and finds her materials among common or garden building supplies – shielding fleece, barrier tape, plastic containers, shower curtains, and the like. And throughout this the Düsseldorf artist references the historical sources of Concrete Art. Kirstin Arndt does not simply present the materials she uses, they are as it were “re-informed” by her: She releases the things from their original functional contexts, gives them form, and lends them a new purpose. In her untitled piece from 2007, she has taken industrially manufactured truck tarpaulins, complete with their functional hooks and eyes, and hung them on the wall. Quite profane, but composed most exactly to produce a charged effect. A tarpaulin coated in matt silver in the shape of a square hangs directly on the wall; to the right the silver gives way to a shiny green, thus loosening up the feeling of a two-dimensional panel painting. Kirstin Arndt manages to approach found objects with a heightened sensitivity and attention, as both an artist and a beholder. The silver tarpaulin advances to become a monochrome picture surface, the green tarpaulin is fixed in such a way that its right-hand side evokes a Baroque arrangement of folds. In this way the work literally evolves an inner dynamism that does not simply distract our gaze on second sight from perceiving a mere “thing in itself”. The effect is astonishing – not least because this art undermines the viewer’s expectations by the simplest of means. This is clearly one of the great visual or aesthetic strengths in Kirstin Arndt’s works. But the true consequence of this piece only reveals itself once one leaves the perceptual level in order to bring to mind the artistic concept behind it. The artist draws on the underpinnings of Concrete Art and transgresses them by taking them literally and enriching them by a clever marriage with the concept of the readymade. That this marriage may truly be made in heaven and not of the shotgun variety is revealed impressively in Kirstin Arndt’s works.

Ralf Christofori