Thomas Kiesewetter

Thomas Kiesewetter’s sculptures are abstract, but with the gait and torque of bodies in motion. While they continue the artist’s interest in assembling forms, here he has made them out of cardboard, which were then cast in bronze. As in his previous work in sheet metal, the pieces in this exhibition show the evidence of improvisational construction, resulting from folding, bending, and riveting cardboard. In bronze, Kiesewetter’s forms gain a new sense of volume, while keeping their lively color, achieved now through both traditional patinas and those mixed with pigments, including blue, green, and white.

Kiesewetter’s work features forms related to industry, construction, and the urban environment. At the same time, they have the animated angularity of animal and human movement. These are abstract forms that through their physicality and humor encourage an imaginative response.

The sculptures in the exhibition, which have been produced in editions of three, bear a direct relation to the history of modernist sculpture, especially Cubist assemblages and Constructivist forms, and the work of Tatilin. In an ArtForum review, Nell McClister noted that like him, “...Kiesewetter humanizes the industrial while maintaining emphasis on the...nature of industry, and offers [an] updated model of the possibilities for a twenty-first century urban humanity under construction."

Thomas Kiesewetter