An exhibition at his 80th birthday

HANDLING      Wolfgang Nestler

HANDLING
Wolfgang Nestler

On the occasion of the artist Wolfgang Nestler’s momentous birthday, I have chosen one or two works for each decade of his life. These mean a lot to me because they have moved me and – far more importantly – because they stand for an aesthetic attitude that amazes and supplements us.

The selection was an easy one for me, because basically I could have blindly picked one, ten or a hundred of his work numbers. An essential moment of the sculptor’s works would always have remained visible and perceptible: Simple and precise handling, instrument of an infinite communication – an aesthetic, a socio-political, an integrative and interactive multilogue. Nestler’s works have emerged from his participatory attitude: Masterful and yet always improvised creations, charged with an almost irrepressible vital energy that, on top of everything else, flashes up in a fundamentally probing state of rest, a lurking dynamic – all the more so when we are finally allowed to handle them ourselves in the imaginary or in the real. For the works are waiting to be used in order to change themselves, the space, the view and above all us – not our ordering consciousness, but the sensitive body, the indispensable vessel of all ideas, all emotions, all physical and psychical reactions – the carrier of every action that does not despair in self-centeredness.

These metals, woods – truly materialized invitations; these lines, circle segments, cubes, pyramids – indeed signs of stereometric orientation: Not only do they tell of an artist’s life, but over at least six decades they develop a narrative, or better a choreography of an in- and a togetherness: community in motion.

On the occasion of the artist Wolfgang Nestler’s momentous birthday, I have chosen one or two works for each decade of his life. These mean a lot to me because they have moved me and – far more importantly – because they stand for an aesthetic attitude that amazes and supplements us.

The selection was an easy one for me, because basically I could have blindly picked one, ten or a hundred of his work numbers. An essential moment of the sculptor’s works would always have remained visible and perceptible: Simple and precise handling, instrument of an infinite communication – an aesthetic, a socio-political, an integrative and interactive multilogue. Nestler’s works have emerged from his participatory attitude: Masterful and yet always improvised creations, charged with an almost irrepressible vital energy that, on top of everything else, flashes up in a fundamentally probing state of rest, a lurking dynamic – all the more so when we are finally allowed to handle them ourselves in the imaginary or in the real. For the works are waiting to be used in order to change themselves, the space, the view and above all us – not our ordering consciousness, but the sensitive body, the indispensable vessel of all ideas, all emotions, all physical and psychical reactions – the carrier of every action that does not despair in self-centeredness.

These metals, woods – truly materialized invitations; these lines, circle segments, cubes, pyramids – indeed signs of stereometric orientation: Not only do they tell of an artist’s life, but over at least six decades they develop a narrative, or better a choreography of an in- and a togetherness: community in motion.