Silke BergModus-Off

Combining observation, memory and experience, Silke Berg’s colourful sculptures with various textile and unstructured shapes recast moments of silence and pictorial situations. Silke Berg (*1989) originally from Denmark, who is based in Leipzig, works with canvas that she paints with vivid colours. Silke Berg has a vibrant approach to colours and material, when she plays with the form, she touches a ludic aspect of the compositions. By sewing, she extends the surfaces, bringing them away from their originally two-dimensional surface. By stuffing the sewn material and by creating forms referring to human bodies and human size, the works look usable. Placing them in spaces or on bodies, the artist activates the structures giving them a new purpose and a new status of «living sculptures». Therefore, the objects could be activated at any time, they are meant to be active, but could also lay to be observed and analyzed. The viewer would have the opportunity to imagine him/herself as a kind of « active sculpture ». We can observe in other series of works that Silke Berg also creates associations that are merely generated regarding a particular utility value through the use of different materials, such as buckles, cords, or hooks; a way for her, to re-think and twist the notion of still life and the concept of ellipse, the time-laps that is in between the things and the time, which in extension questions as well the limits and constraint of the Ready-Made. By experimenting with Silke Berg’s visual and physical cosmos, we dive into her rich and bold influences in which she draws inspiration and a certain modus of language. She explores the materials, methods and strategies of craft of artists such as Sophie Tauber-Arp, reinterprets certain forms of Franz West’s ‘Passstücken’ or analyse the visual nature of the Britain artist Phyllida Barlow.
Modus-Off plays with the waiting and the « un-usability » of things and their surroundings. The sculptures refer to a seemingly use-value and practicality. Those non-activated performative objects are meant to allow us to cross her environment and her playful universe. We are dealing with the outdoor life and the rigging for it, as well as the aesthetics of this certain lifestyle. It is a time-off of a random time where the artist invites you to breathe and to enjoy the poetic of her narrative.