(...) Things are different for Manfred Wakolbinger. Strange forms that afford an inner life appear early on in the development of his sculptural work. Conical volumes made of plaster contain empty, shiny copper vessels that echo an outer shape. This combination of materials and form is so specific, so precious and so harmonious that it is no wonder that this concept, this process of using an extremely smooth, shiny surface to create a sculpture, is again resolutely pursued in the most recent works.

Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth (1) Poetry is a Utopian act in which the truth does not emerge through but in the language (see Walter Benjamin). In the poetic production process, both with physical material as well as immaterial, language enters the realm of things and the things acquire language, uniting facts and truth, form and content. This is the starting point if we want to understand the transgression of language that is represented as feedback between object and subject in the individual work groups of Manfred Wakolbinger, and in the Placements in particular. Manfred Wakolbinger is a kind of metaphysicist, constantly producing his own field of research in a new process, transforming states of aggregation, bringing them into opposition with one another and as a physical manifestation of the unsayable. He anchors his artistic work in a dual principle: If, according to Wittgenstein’s formula, the “limits of my language” mean the “limits of my world”, then Wakolbinger expands these limits by means of a reified language and at the same time plays reality off against illusion. He creates paradoxical perceptual situations, like recursive processes between bodies, signs and observers, in order to explore the basic structures and principles of the world.

I saw a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices, an unremarkable part of the sky that had been named after a pharaoh’s wife by the Greek astronomer Conon of Samos in the third century BCE. Berenice had sworn to sacrifice her shimmering golden hair if her husband came back unscathed from his war against the Assyrians. The pharaoh returned triumphant, and Berenice laid her severed skeins of hair at the feet of a statue of the goddess of love. When her offering disappeared overnight, the Greek court astronomer showed the furious pharaoh, who believed the hair had been stolen, three stars in the following night’s sky and said that the goddess Aphrodite had turned his queen’s offering of golden hair into those stars.

Manfred Wakolbinger's gaze since his childhood has been directed outward and upward. He was fascinated by the first satellite Sputnik and wanted and still wants to know how far the human influence reaches. Manfred is first and foremost a self-educated sculptor. He gained his first experience in tool machining and tool making and even though he evolved his artistic ideas and sculptures in the 1980ies, he never resigned from the technical component. His entities are precisely constructed, are built. Thus he is a sculptor who creates his sculptures from his favorite material. In the beginning, they were monolithic sculptures that were almost hermetically sealed with their rough, concrete-like surface.

J Perhaps we should talk about the title “Inhale Exhale”. M Breathing – something truly essential … J … for all of us … M … Yes, nothing happens without it. Sometimes when I’m on a diving expedition, I find myself watching the air bubbles from people’s breathing as they head up towards the surface. It’s interesting when our breathing takes on a visible shape since the whole thing happens under pressure, deep down. And as the bubbles rise, the pressure decreases and they expand, they change shape, then burst and suddenly become something completely new. The air is in water, an element that’s attracted by similar molecules. This attraction creates very impressive changes and transformations. ( Nr. 1 ) But as soon as this has happened, the shape disperses and is gone. This disappearance and dispersal is about life and death.

When David Cameron uses his experiences from the deep sea dives to the wreck of Titanic to inform the fantastic images of another world in AVATAR, he employs a commonly used device: Images and beings from the underwater world are transmitted through the eye into our inner self and transform into a distant intergalactic world. Our desire for knowledge about deep remote space is at once satisfied and stimulated with images of landscapes and creatures from a world the water’s surface separates from us.

Particularly in his more recent works, in which peopled and unpeopled landscapes, photography and sculpture are inextricably linked and interwoven, Manfred Wakolbinger touches upon the tireless question of the essence and appearance of categorical givens, which in the subject area at hand refer above all to the concepts of reality and fiction, illusion and reality, image and language, thing and object. For on closer inspection the matter-of-course way the images present the assemblage of their heterogeneous elements as a homogenous whole here is revealed as illusory; a game of intended deception and montage.

Universalism and spirituality were already exorcised from the Dominican Church in Krems by Josef II in 1786: since its secularization, the gothic hall has been used as a meeting place for state parliaments, as a warehouse and factory, then as a theater and cinema. The newly founded Landesgalerie für zeitgenössische Kunst is now responsible for a promising exhibition program in the spectacular rooms.

AS: Given that the exhibition currently being held in the context of ZEIT KUNST NIEDER.STERREICH offers an insight into the last three decades of your artistic work, I would first be interested to know what made you want to become an artist. Was there a particular moment in your life when you said, yes, that’s it, that’s what I want to do?

Is it a bottom view that Manfred Wakolbinger draws his creative power from? Or perhaps just a bottom memory? Indeed, his previous work already comprises a number of motifs that might be read and reappraised as reflecting subaquatic impressions, notably so against the background of his most recent underwater photography. These motifs include not only the subject of containment that keeps reappearing in endless variations, but also the dream of an infinite volume, of the mutual permeation of form and content.

Seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. It’s a hum-bling thought, even more staggering when you consider scientists estimate we have only scratched the surface of exploring our planet’s lakes and rivers, oceans and seas. But while it’s true we know so little, we already know so much. I know this may sound confusing, but bear in mind that hundreds of thousands of scuba divers are certified each year because we do know the underwater world is something entirely special.

Is it ever possible to have enough of the sea? Saturated, the reservoir of a summer which has to last a whole year. Days spent on stones, encrusted with salt, night-time imagery seen with closed eyes, the sea, which pushes its way into narrow cracks and channels. Sea tomatoes, compact ball form, firey red or a bouquet of flames unfolding, balunids, hidden crabs, rock shells wandering over the grown-over rocks, “crab on a rock,” you cried in your sleep.

The body of the sculpture, broken up or opened, with its center laid bare and accentuated as an open and hollow interior plays a central role in Wakolbinger’s œuvre. Thus, he undermines the notion that sculpture is about compact and static volumes while taking into account that it is bound to space. His concrete sculptures of the eighties, with inset elements of copper sheet, offered hidden beauty and preciousness. Their shell structures i.a. pointed to the act of enveloping space and to space being enveloped as a theme of sculpture.

The strategies intrinsic to form as expressed in the sculptural shapes of Manfred Wakolbinger’s œuvre are determined by the dialectic theme of how physically material and sensorily empirical processes of perception can be relativized or seen as something absolute. Seeing material, empirical moments as absolute does not only denote an immediate, bodily and haptic encounter, a quasi-“corporeal” relation with the sculptural phenomenon but also an inexorable confrontation with the highly sensual connotations, sometimes even bordering on the sexual, which evolve through the strong presence of the material properties of the shapes.

In the Sunshine is the title of one of Manfred Wakolbinger’s sculptures from 1984. It is an ensemble of presented and pœresenting elements: an interplay of free forms vaguely reminiscent of human figures and a supporting construction which also articulates itself as a carrier of meaning. Two copper elements combine to form a figure. An angular piece which supports a cogwheel-like shape, and a semicircle above a long flat element give rise to the image of a reclining figure in a relaxed pose.

During the night of October 4, 1957, a radio report reminiscent of Orson Welles’s exploits announced that Sputnik would pass over Austria. The entire population of Mitterkirchen, a small place in Upper Austria, was out and about, scanning the sky for the spaceship in orbit. Nobody actually caught a glimpse of it, but the collective fascination with the mystery of technology was a rite of passage for Manfred Wakolbinger, five years old then.

Ladies and Gentlemen. Were we to be on the banks of the Ganges my task here today would probably be easier. I would then not need to offer an involved explanation of a philosophical concept of existence, would not have to endeavor to set out a phenomenological description of our being-in-the-world, I would not have to elaborate on how the Latin word existence reflects the Greek word ecstasy, I would not need to make many remarks on the foundation of the ecstatic in the everyday and of the everyday in the ecstatic, and I would also not need to always speak so unnaturally clearly to ensure the recording experts from Indian TV were kept happy.

Inside a white gallery the visitor moves and stops, approaches, withdraws and circles. The forms on display encourage physical encounter, but this is discouraged again by materials – that blank, substantial concrete and, in a different way, by the slivers of sheet metal it surrounds. The move from concrete to copper, cool to warm, marks a shift from body language to sheer optical sensation. As the bipartite structure plays or the relation between whole and part, tensions are established between what can be grasped and how literally metaphors of touch may be construed.