About the Works

POINTS of RESISTANCE IV: Skills for Peace presents three of Andreas Blank’s iconic works – a businessman’s white shirt carefully folded atop his briefcase, and military boots standing upright in their box, ready to wear. The juxtaposition of these two works is sadly emblematic of our times. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, war has tragically returned to Europe. In many Ukrainian cities, people are working from home or from bomb shelters, while offices are allocated to the streams of refugees fleeing from homes turned into battlegrounds. Those conscripted into the war on both sides, forced to fight for expansion or required to stay and defend their homeland, have replaced their business attire with combat boots, and their briefcases with guns. And with so many lost lives being mourned in Ukraine,  Blank’s basalt shroud hanging on the wall is reminiscent of the mirrors draped over in black in the houses of the dead.

To a certain extent, the work has an archaeological character: the contemporary world, here: German history, becomes petrified, it acquires timelessness. In this case, a real pair of leather military boots, with which Andreas Blank’s grandfather returned from the war and from captivity, was the template - the boots were stored in a box under the roof for decades. The box was then set in stone to form the inverted base. The pedestal is also a time depot at the same time. It is a real anti-war piece.

– Stephan von Wiese

In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation, and assembles them as deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. In his precise installations, the apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. Whether marble, alabaster, or porphyry, material historically used to serve religious or political functions, has in Blank’s hands acquired a seemingly casual and fragmentary character. The geographical and cultural identity of the stone and the memorial function of stone-sculpture in general refer to the value of each object. Blank questions the obvious and transforms traditional ideals, subverting the value of the ordinary and mundane. In a discourse of image and likeness, things lose their functional purpose, transcending into pure, formalistic objects. Stone sculptures, which historically were intended primarily for political representation or religious devotion, in Andreas Blank’s works come to question a (post)modernist nihilism. His works succeed to condense time and narrative structures, stretching the limits of traditional sculpture.

About the Artist

Andreas Blank (born in Ansbach in 1976) is a Berlin-based sculptor. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was a student of Prof. Harald Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his Master of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. Among other venues, he has exhibited at Choi&Lager Galerie Köln (2021), Galerie Knecht und Burster, Karlsruhe (2019), Bernheimer Contemporary, Berlin (2016), Royal College of Art, London (2009).