It is the task of sculpture to explore the distribution of volumes in space, their alignment, their weight, the materials, the constellation of the surfaces, their proportions, the distribution of light, their relationship to the setting and their either extensive or intense qualities. So we are engaging with art about the body, which has an explicative relationship to the other bodies in the world, as if they were study objects, doubles, anatomical preparations. The sculpture of today clearly tends to spread diffusely in space as a collage of materials, mercilessly displaying and exposing the worlds of commodities, the delusional world of consumer culture, the built and artificial environments as puzzles with nostalgic charm in a fragile, sentimental aesthetic.

Very few of these engage with the solid state of the body, with the integral volume and investigative horizons of form and content. It looks entirely as if the constitutive function of sculpture, a response to the body in space, has been lost to the technological disciplines, which are in the process of designing curious anthropomorphic dwellings for AI-operated robotics. The sculptures, which are scaled to the human body, are, it seems, discredited by the cult of monumental dimensions. So the sculptures being made are either far too big or too small, vast memorials or little figures.

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.

On display are the biomorphic figures characteristic of work by Manfred Wakolbinger, beings that abstractly adopt the lines of an organic mass being pulled apart like dough. The lines are not infrequently excentric, overstretched, producing extremely capricious figures in combination with the high-end finish. These are now enclosed as a volume by the outer curved surface, and have a hollow space that is in turn bordered by an extremely smooth, reflective outer surface. While they clearly play through the boundaries of form and materiality outwardly, these sculptures are oriented towards the inside in a particular manner, namely through an interior reflective surface that runs all the way around and furnishes the pseudo-organic object with a soul. It is as if the complex laws of organic self-organisation have now also taken possession of the sculpture, which would actually be quite logical. While Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Gregory Bateson pursued the self-perception of the organic in models of autopoiesis and self-observation, Manfred Wakolbinger began to formulate a subtle artistic response to the demand for self-reflexivity for the living volume.

So, with these sculptures one has what one could call Self-Reflective Sculpture, whereby it is not the volume returning onto itself, rather a surface that has shifted inwards and records itself.

Engagement with the sculptural vocabulary in these works is also placed in other dimensions of the genre, for example in relationship to the pedestal, which becomes a precisely fitting counter-sculpture on which the enthroned figure can stage its play with gravity. The duplication of the body in this interpretation of pedestal and sculpture completely overrides the pedestal’s function of providing emphasis, of removing the sculpture from the world. Instead, the sculpture is embedded on the pedestal as if in a cradle for the world, as if in a socio-body that explains that a body never comes alone, and why and how this is so. It is the pedestal itself that does not withdraw the sculpture from the world, but that first gives it to the world. The deforming power of biomorphisation not only makes the lines go organically crazy, but even animates the pedestal to come alive in an all-over pygmalion operation. The sculptures, equipped with inner self-reflection, are lap creatures on their lap-pedestal, which presents them like a lovingly complicit part of the world that fits them perfectly.