Flash Art, Summer, 1988, by MEYER RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN
EBERHARD BOSSLET
JOHN GIBSON GALLERY
While the work of Germany‘s most intriguing younger sculptor, Reinhard Mucha, has barely been shown in New York, the 35 years old Eberhard Bosslet recently had his second one person show here. I bring up Mucha not to belittle Bosslet in any way, merely to point out a discrepancy between two related artists.
Like Mucha, Bosslet employs functional products to construct his sculptures, but whereas Mucha incorporates an enigmatic conceptualism into his rickety works, Bosslet favors a tightly constructed and constructivist formalism in which a limited number of motifs are subjected to controlled permutations. The effect is somewhat as if Joseph Albers had chosen to work with office furniture instead of oil and canvas. Each of the works in his recent show used three elements: second-hand filing cabinets, roughly sawn wooden blocks and metal strapping tape. Variously on the floor and walls, the pieces present square and rectangular compositions as the metal cabinets or their drawers are fitted together and held in place by the wood and strapping tape. Bosslet never alters his materials, so that the color of his work is dependent on the ordinary matte colors (khaki, black, drab green, and orangish red) which the previous owners found suitable for whatever dingy office they occupied. The strapping tape is used, always in two parallel strips, to shoot lines across the surfaces of the cabinets and drawers, while the wood works as a tonal highlight, in addition to its functional role as offering the strapping tape something to dig into, and thus hold the piece together.
Bosslet‘s low key materials and reductive compositions put him closer to Arte Povera than to, on the one hand, Mucha‘s virtuoso extravaganzas, or, on the other, the sleek elegance of the commodity buyers. In the no nonsense environment of the John Gibson Gallery – where the only thing present besides the art is a simple table on which the gallery‘s business is conducted and where the gallery employees eat lunch, unconcealed by any stylish architecture—Bosslet‘s work looked very much at home and one felt at home looking at it. These are units of recycled objects in which nothing is wasted or conccaled, in which the functional is placed at the service of an unassuming beauty.
Meyer Raphael Rubinstein
EBERHARD BOSSLET
JOHN GIBSON GALLERY
While the work of Germany‘s most intriguing younger sculptor, Reinhard Mucha, has barely been shown in New York, the 35 years old Eberhard Bosslet recently had his second one person show here. I bring up Mucha not to belittle Bosslet in any way, merely to point out a discrepancy between two related artists.
Like Mucha, Bosslet employs functional products to construct his sculptures, but whereas Mucha incorporates an enigmatic conceptualism into his rickety works, Bosslet favors a tightly constructed and constructivist formalism in which a limited number of motifs are subjected to controlled permutations. The effect is somewhat as if Joseph Albers had chosen to work with office furniture instead of oil and canvas. Each of the works in his recent show used three elements: second-hand filing cabinets, roughly sawn wooden blocks and metal strapping tape. Variously on the floor and walls, the pieces present square and rectangular compositions as the metal cabinets or their drawers are fitted together and held in place by the wood and strapping tape. Bosslet never alters his materials, so that the color of his work is dependent on the ordinary matte colors (khaki, black, drab green, and orangish red) which the previous owners found suitable for whatever dingy office they occupied. The strapping tape is used, always in two parallel strips, to shoot lines across the surfaces of the cabinets and drawers, while the wood works as a tonal highlight, in addition to its functional role as offering the strapping tape something to dig into, and thus hold the piece together.
Bosslet‘s low key materials and reductive compositions put him closer to Arte Povera than to, on the one hand, Mucha‘s virtuoso extravaganzas, or, on the other, the sleek elegance of the commodity buyers. In the no nonsense environment of the John Gibson Gallery – where the only thing present besides the art is a simple table on which the gallery‘s business is conducted and where the gallery employees eat lunch, unconcealed by any stylish architecture—Bosslet‘s work looked very much at home and one felt at home looking at it. These are units of recycled objects in which nothing is wasted or conccaled, in which the functional is placed at the service of an unassuming beauty.
Meyer Raphael Rubinstein
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