A Show for Sheldon Cohen 

13 September - 11 October 2008

An exhibition catalogue will be available soon. Please contact us.

See also our News item.

The exhibition is presented as a tribute to Sheldon Cohen and consists of sculptures, drawings, prints and an animation work.

'Joachim Schönfeldt draws and sculpts in parallel. His drawing contributes to the conceptual and physical realization of his sculpture. The workbench in his studio is full of loose, scuffed sheets of paper on which there are detailed drawings of animals and structures in various elevations, as well as much-used notebooks containing numerous drawings. These drawings are akin to the drawing books intended for artists which have been produced throughout the ages. Such books have traditionally been designed to teach the young artist how to construct a plausible image of the human or animal figure in two- or three-dimensional form by providing examples to be copied and simple diagrams to be memorized.

In traversing the parallels between drawing and sculpting, an empty space is created in which Schönfeldt can “lose” or “gain” conceptually. This conceptual space between drawing and sculpture, and the creative leap between the two, is paramount. Empty speech bubbles of the kind found in some of the drawings suggest the loss of a language, or being at a loss for words. Conversely, full speech bubbles put words in the mouth of the animal and construct the dumb beast as a “speaker”. These words may be animal sounds, such as those in the soundtrack of the animated dvd on this exhibition, with its concomitant storyboard drawings, and those in the live orchestral performance on the base of Schönfeldt’s pyramidal sculpture installation at the Gwangju Biennale in September 2008; or they may be ironic inscriptions in the bubbles, reading “What they say” and “How things are”. In an interview, Schönfeldt relates this type of language to traditional African practices, saying that “… African society used an oral tradition augmented with objects … [which] were animated with language to educate children and adults alike”. Schönfeldt asks what it would take to “re-animate” these objects once they are removed from context and placed, for example, in curiosity cabinets. The blank speech bubbles, the wailing sounds of Schönfeldt’s animal sculptures bemoan this sense of loss. 

 Schönfeldt’s drawings do not so much articulate a sense of loss as trace what can be regained after such a loss. Although his drawings might “lose” the diagrammatic quality of proportion suggested in the early drawing books, or a sense of internal structure suggested in the later books, they gain a conceptual view of structure, especially in the three digital prints on exhibition. The exploded view in these prints attests to the fact that his sculptures are basically externally assembled, with different wood blocks interlocking with one another to form the whole work. In addition, some pages in his notebooks provide the measurements, to scale, of the wooden logs required for the back, the body, the front and the heads of his sculpted animals. His drawings also provide numerous conceptual configurations for the animals, tried out in the various maquettes on exhibition, whether stacked on top of one another in a pyramid shape, with the largest (the cow) at the bottom and the smallest (the peahen) at the top, or inverted, with the smallest at the bottom and the largest at the top. The most important thing that is gained in these various configurations is the re-animation of the decontextualized object. “In a way,” Schönfeldt continues in the interview cited earlier, “my images are pedantic pictures attempting to re-animate objects that I produce. The images I make are not an attempt to look at repositories of cultural objects, but are reductions of the contextual performances that produce those cultural objects.” Drawing is the most direct, conscious space in which the artist works. Here he observes his process, from beginning to end, and at times sustains a continuous concentration. It is replenishing. It is one of the few practices through which he can understand the source of his art and reflect on it in a workmanlike way.'