Wolfgang Sophie
The Material of their Materials.
Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp
A poetic visualization by Wolfgang Nestler
“The world’s primordial material – and this includes the substance of childhood – is given a language by artists and poets and it is effective in them”, says the sculptor Wolfgang Nestler. “Just as the art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp is connected to the experiences of her childhood, with the house she grew up in.” This idea is revived by the twice Documenta-participant in his installation “Stoff ihrer Stoffe – Hommage à Sophie Taeuber-Arp” [The material of their materials – Homage à Sophie Taeuber-Arp]. It can be seen from September 6, 2020 through January 15, 2022 at Kunstraum Krüger |Berlin.
At the center of Wolfgang Nestler’s second homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp is an approximately six-meter long, angled table with which the sculptor transposes a two-dimensional form from Taeuber-Arp’s gouache “Six espaces avec croix” (created in 1932) into three-dimensional space. The large blue table is an invitation: It is the surface staging Nestler’s photographs of the house and landscape in which Sophie Taeuber-Arp lived in Switzerland as a child. A total of 150 photographs can be seen at Kunstraum Krüger. They explore the “red house” in Trogen, built by Sophie’s mother at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the landscape of the Appenzell region as geographical sculptures, as the origin of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s creative vision.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a freelance artist as well as an editor and interior designer. Hans Arp, her husband, wrote about his wife, who died in 1943: “She dreamt day and night of living circles.”In the style of her designs for a round table and a smaller side table created in Paris in 1930, Wolfgang Nestler redesigned and built the two pieces of furniture for the exhibition in Appenzell in 2009. Together with these and the photographs, he engages his two circular sculptures “Sonnenerinnerung” [Remembering the sun] and “Begreif den Kreis und entscheide Dich” [Grasp the circle and decide] into a dialogue.
Visitors are invited to trace both the photographic world of forms and shapes on the table as well as the impulses of the circular sculptures by creating their own experience through them: To discover within themselves, and together with Taeuber-Arp’s and Nestler’s sculptural systems of order, that they can set something in motion and that something within them is stimulated also means asking new questions about art. “This dialogical approach is at the core of the concept of this exhibition as it has shaped the artistic creations of my artist colleague as well,” says Wolfgang Nestler.
“Both Wolfgang Nestler’s and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s interests lie in the experience of form and in movement,” observed Dr. Roland Scotti, curator and managing director of the Heinrich Gebert Cultural Foundation Appenzell, Appenzell Art Museum and Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte, on the occasion of Wolfgang Nestler’s exhibition “Sophie’s Islands” in 2009. Similarities between Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Wolfgang Nestler can be discovered, according to Scotti, “in their undogmatic artistic attitude, in a playful yet precise openness of design, in their consistent structuring of spaces […], and an energetic penetration of the individual works that occasionally recall choreographed traces of figural shapes […].”
“They are related artists,” writes Johannes Kühn, winner of the Friedrich Hölderlin Award, in his poem from 2020 “Wolfgang Nestler, / Sophie Taeuber-Arp”. The first lines of the verse read: “Their lightness breezing in my mind / Must be supremely lauded! – / Sophie died the very year / That he was born.”
* The gouache is in the collection of the Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno
Performance Appenzell 2009
Wolfgang Nestler,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Their lightness breezing in my mind
Must be supremely lauded!
Sophie died the very year
That he was born −
Shining rainbow lights
Interplay of lines
Danciest entanglement
Breathing zest and joie de vivre.
Souls and shapes
That give us pleasure
Are handed as experience
By both with almost equal strength.
Now I am pleased – so sings the fool
The way they let him sing –
So thinks the sage
The way they let him think.
Creating thus in varied image
They are related artists.
The spirit breezes where it will
With troubling and
With simple things.
Re-composed by Brigitte Pichon
and Dorian Rudnytsky.
Schloss Stetten, March 2020
„Tätige Form – Form at Work“
Film by Gabi Bollinger from 2017
(8:15 mins)
Setting out…
I was surprised by the almost eight-minute film “Wolfgang Nestler – Tätige Form / Form at work”. Rarely have I learned so much about an artist in such a short period of time, about his work and about sculpture as such, spanning from the love of materials via love of craftsmanship to love of life itself.
It is almost too much – and yet everything is concentrated within the objects or forms presented by the artist Wolfgang Nestler waiting for us to finally get moving. And then, after we have seized the offer made by the tensions, energies and experiential spheres inherent in Nestler’s works, we can – perhaps – set ourselves in motion and through an action at a certain moment or for an instant, change the world.
May 2018; Dr. Roland Scotti
Curator, Kunstmuseum Appenzell
"Sculpture as Variable System"
Video from 1975 (18:13 mins)
Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp
A poetic visualization by Wolfgang Nestler
“The world’s primordial material – and this includes the substance of childhood – is given a language by artists and poets and it is effective in them”, says the sculptor Wolfgang Nestler. “Just as the art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp is connected to the experiences of her childhood, with the house she grew up in.” This idea is revived by the twice Documenta-participant in his installation “Stoff ihrer Stoffe – Hommage à Sophie Taeuber-Arp” [The material of their materials – Homage à Sophie Taeuber-Arp]. It can be seen from September 6, 2020 through January 15, 2022 at Kunstraum Krüger |Berlin.
At the center of Wolfgang Nestler’s second homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp is an approximately six-meter long, angled table with which the sculptor transposes a two-dimensional form from Taeuber-Arp’s gouache “Six espaces avec croix” (created in 1932) into three-dimensional space. The large blue table is an invitation: It is the surface staging Nestler’s photographs of the house and landscape in which Sophie Taeuber-Arp lived in Switzerland as a child. A total of 150 photographs can be seen at Kunstraum Krüger. They explore the “red house” in Trogen, built by Sophie’s mother at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the landscape of the Appenzell region as geographical sculptures, as the origin of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s creative vision.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a freelance artist as well as an editor and interior designer. Hans Arp, her husband, wrote about his wife, who died in 1943: “She dreamt day and night of living circles.”In the style of her designs for a round table and a smaller side table created in Paris in 1930, Wolfgang Nestler redesigned and built the two pieces of furniture for the exhibition in Appenzell in 2009. Together with these and the photographs, he engages his two circular sculptures “Sonnenerinnerung” [Remembering the sun] and “Begreif den Kreis und entscheide Dich” [Grasp the circle and decide] into a dialogue.
Visitors are invited to trace both the photographic world of forms and shapes on the table as well as the impulses of the circular sculptures by creating their own experience through them: To discover within themselves, and together with Taeuber-Arp’s and Nestler’s sculptural systems of order, that they can set something in motion and that something within them is stimulated also means asking new questions about art. “This dialogical approach is at the core of the concept of this exhibition as it has shaped the artistic creations of my artist colleague as well,” says Wolfgang Nestler.
“Both Wolfgang Nestler’s and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s interests lie in the experience of form and in movement,” observed Dr. Roland Scotti, curator and managing director of the Heinrich Gebert Cultural Foundation Appenzell, Appenzell Art Museum and Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte, on the occasion of Wolfgang Nestler’s exhibition “Sophie’s Islands” in 2009. Similarities between Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Wolfgang Nestler can be discovered, according to Scotti, “in their undogmatic artistic attitude, in a playful yet precise openness of design, in their consistent structuring of spaces […], and an energetic penetration of the individual works that occasionally recall choreographed traces of figural shapes […].”
“They are related artists,” writes Johannes Kühn, winner of the Friedrich Hölderlin Award, in his poem from 2020 “Wolfgang Nestler, / Sophie Taeuber-Arp”. The first lines of the verse read: “Their lightness breezing in my mind / Must be supremely lauded! – / Sophie died the very year / That he was born.”
* The gouache is in the collection of the Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno
Excerpts from the Exhibition Sophie’s Islands, Appenzell 2009
Impressions:
Photographic responses by Wolfgang Nestler to his installation in Appenzell 2009.
Photographs: Manos Meisen, Wolfgang Nestler
Sophie Danced and Dreamt
Film of the Dance- and Text-Performance in the Pictorial
Assembly of Wolfgang Nestler’s exhibition – Sophie’s Islands
Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Information on "Sophie Danced and Dreamt"
Nelly Bütikofer
with dancers and speakers of the Fasson Theater, Zurich.
Claire Birrfelder-May
Karin Minger
Utz Bodamer
Bodo Krumwiede
Texts by Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Max Bill
Music by Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven
Film by Christel Blömeke and Frank Weigand
Cut Frank Weigand
Concept Wolfgang Nestler and Roland Scotti
“In the great exhibition hall in which the performance for Wolfgang Nestler’s homage to the pictorial craft of Sophie Taeuber-Arp took place, he had positioned forms and lines like a carpet: colorful squares and black lines. The protagonists danced and narrated along them. They followed the laughing and serious lines, listened to the loud and soft circles, wandered around the pictorial assembly of the weaver, the dancer, the painter, the creator. Sophie Taeuber’s world is playfully light and easy.”
Excerpt from Monica Dörig, Appenzeller Volksfreund
Foundation Liner Appenzell
Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte
July 2009
© Wolfgang Nestler 2009
Press Release 2020 –
Exhibition Wolfgang Nestler: The Material of their Materials. Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp
A poetic visualization by Wolfgang Nestler
Performance Appenzell 2009
Wolfgang Nestler,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
their lightness breezing in my mind
Must be supremely lauded!
Sophie died the very year
That he was born −
Shining rainbow lights
Interplay of lines
Danciest entanglement
Breathing zest and joie de vivre.
Souls and shapes
That give us pleasure
Are handed as experience
By both with almost equal strength.
Now I am pleased – so sings the fool
The way they let him sing –
So thinks the sage
The way they let him think.
Creating thus in varied image
They are related artists.
The spirit breezes where it will
With troubling and
With simple things.
Re-composed by Brigitte Pichon
and Dorian Rudnytsky.
Schloss Stetten, March 2020
Performance Appenzell 2009
Wolfgang Nestler,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Their lightness breezing in my mind
Must be supremely lauded!
Sophie died the very year
That he was born −
Shining rainbow lights
Interplay of lines
Danciest entanglement
Breathing zest and joie de vivre.
Souls and shapes
That give us pleasure
Are handed as experience
By both with almost equal strength.
Now I am pleased – so sings the fool
The way they let him sing –
So thinks the sage
The way they let him think.
Creating thus in varied image
They are related artists.
The spirit breezes where it will
With troubling and
With simple things.
Re-composed by Brigitte Pichon
and Dorian Rudnytsky.
Schloss Stetten, March 2020
„Tätige Form – Form at Work“
Film by Gabi Bollinger from 2017
(8:15 mins)
Setting out…
I was surprised by the almost eight-minute film “Wolfgang Nestler – Tätige Form / Form at work”. Rarely have I learned so much about an artist in such a short period of time, about his work and about sculpture as such, spanning from the love of materials via love of craftsmanship to love of life itself.
It is almost too much – and yet everything is concentrated within the objects or forms presented by the artist Wolfgang Nestler waiting for us to finally get moving. And then, after we have seized the offer made by the tensions, energies and experiential spheres inherent in Nestler’s works, we can – perhaps – set ourselves in motion and through an action at a certain moment or for an instant, change the world.
May 2018; Dr. Roland Scotti
Curator, Kunstmuseum Appenzell
"Sculpture as Variable System"
Video from 1975 (18:13 mins)
Press Release 2020 –
Exhibition Wolfgang Nestler: The Material of their Materials. Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp | A poetic visualization by Wolfgang Nestler
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