Bjorn Meyer Ebrecht

I consider myself a studio artist.  By that I mean my work is not defined by a specific medium, but rather that my art is what I make in the studio in any medium.  There are common threads linking all my work, and for me, the experience of these common ideas in very different forms is very important. In the following statement, I will try to provide a guide through some of these threads and ideas.

 I set up certain rules for each group of work, and then am able to play freely within these confines.  Often quite literally one is able to recognize building blocks in my work, and it always relies on very simple methods of construction. In my ink drawings I use tape on the face of the paper to attach various sheets of different-sized paper. In some collages I have cut simple geometric shapes into the pages from architecture books, then spray-painted these cutout shapes, and then reinserted them into their original places. Finally in my recent sculptures I have been using pieces of lumber, which form very simple geometric shapes - emphasizing their specific form even more by painting the sculptures in different colors.  While working in the secluded environment of my studio, I feel the need to somehow bring “the world” into it.  For many years I have been working on the above-mentioned series of large ink drawings.  The way I work and think about my work now crystallized itself in these drawing for the first time.  Each of these drawings is based on a picture taken from modernist architecture books mostly from the 1960s or 1970s.  One important rule for the selection of the picture is that the photograph has to be taken at the time when the building is still new and does not show any traces of time.  Time plays an important role in these drawings.  I am interested what I see as a paradoxical experience of time and space in these drawings: One can look at the image as an elusive document of long-past moment in history, while at the same time experiencing the presence of space in the drawing in the moment and in relation to oneself in the present tense.

The images I employ mostly are mostly of modern architecture.  Architecture is not a means to itself.  I understand architectural images as an imprint of society, as a chair is the imprint of the human body. I look at architecture as a document of social ideas and historic shifts in society. To me as social being and artist looking at “the world” means looking at the world how we, as a society, have built it.  Spoken in practical terms I am interested in institutional architecture, the buildings designed to house schools, cultural centers, libraries, and governments.  In general terms architecture plays also an autobiographical role for me as a German growing up in Post-War Germany, where modernity is completely intertwined with history and the effort to rebuild and overcome German’s troubled 20^th century history.

Since I started collecting images from architecture books, I have always had a lot of books piling up in my studio. Their presence works directly into my studio practice.   First I started taking books apart, severing the pages from the spine and by using the double pages as the bases for my collages.  As a next step I used the remaining book covers. Now I was thinking about the book’s own architecture - with the cloth-cover functioning as a façade of sorts.  By cutting the book cover apart and reassembling it in the shape of an illusionistic, opened book, I created an object that simultaneously exists simultaneously as an abstract shape, the iconic image of a book, and also still as the book itself.

Books entered my work in an even more literal manner in a recent group of sculptures. I have collected a number of paperbacks that I liked for various reasons, some monographs of important modernist architects, but also books about the political questions of housing, urban renewal, and democratic governance.  I decided to build very simple stands to prop each paperback up. In response to each book and its cover design I created a very simple painted wooden geometrical form.  These sculptures are meant to be playful and humorous, but they take their subject (the books) very seriously. In many ways I see these sculptures as small monuments or memorials to modernity, and the subsequent loss of any utopian or visionary thinking.

 I am interested in the tension between the material I bring into the studio, and my way of reacting to it. Though at the beginning I often merely attempt to find ways to display or prop up an image or a book, in the course of this process I sometimes develop a whole abstract language in response to the subject.  In some early collages I created simple geometric shapes, and then became interested in the somewhat difficult-to-define power or authority of these shapes. The name that I coined in response to these shapes was the “ominous form.”  In my work these shapes exist as fragments.  For example in my “Chair Collages” I mix spray-painted and stenciled shapes (circles, hexagons etc.) and cutout reproductions of school chairs. These shapes remind of letters but do not contain any meaning, as if they remnants from a language system from another other time which we only partially are able to understand.  The experience of these abstract shapes is intended to be similar to the experience one might have encountering my ink drawings - here one looks at a drawing of a building, which as a built form is new, has not been used, and has not yet aged – the building remains somehow the embodiment of an idea, of a new vision how to change society, and as such, it is part of a language that we no longer speak.

June 2011