Lot 35: KATJA STRUNZ

 
Untitled
Signed “K Strunz” on the third element.

68 x 29 x 5 1/2 in. (172.7 x 73.7 x 14 cm) overall.

<br>Painted wood in three parts.

2005

Underground Gallery, Athens

It was as a student in Germany that Katja Strunz was first exposed to Robert Smithson’s prism-like 1964 sculpture, Untitled, 2005, and was inspired to create the wall-mounted, angular, monochromatic objects that have established and informed her identity as an artist. Her influential works, such as those included in the present lot, study the human notion of possession of space. Wall-mounted works allude to folded planes lithely alighted on the wall like birds, and yet the mediums used are often indelicate and raw, sometimes found, and always treated in a manner that enhances their true material qualities.
The present lot is comprised of three such forms, made of wood and painted solid black and white with care to preserve the grain in the wood. This respect for materials is reflected in the manner of the grouping, which questions our eye’s regard for gravity and the density of form. The interaction between these objects references a natural flocking among groups of individuals. “The ubiquitous living-on of forms in Strunz’s work is neither eulogized as so many failed promises nor affirmed as still-wished-for utopian possibility but instead is maintained equivocally as the support for a continuing practice. Many of Strunz’s spatial compositions suggest movement arrested in flight, and her iconography flirts with mimesis, legible as enfolded or spread wings.” (S. Hudson, “Suzanne Hudson on Katja Strunz,” Artforum, New York, April 2006, p. 235).
The present lot is exemplary of Strunz’s oeuvre and its regard for human spaces and the objects that invade them. Untitled, 2005, is an answer to the dialogue begun by earthworks of artists such as Smithson and Richard Serra. Strunz’s choice of strong, integral materials is a nod to the latter artists’ considerations of space; but the fleeting, light nature of her compositions perhaps more directly addresses other elements: those of levity and impermanence.