Artists

Sturm, Erik

Neue Qualität, 2019
Courtesy: Erik Sturm, Foto: Erik Sturm

Erik Sturm takes urban space as his point of departure. For the past several years, the artist has kept a studio in the middle of the construction zone for Stuttgart 21, the city’s “once-in-a-century” railway and development project in the center of the city. Here, he observes the city’s rapid restructuring and the drastic means by which this project is being pushed forward. As an artist, Sturm focuses on phenomena that, despite their extreme significance, would usually seem marginal or escape the attention of the city’s inhabitants. He has spent a great deal of time working with fine dust, for example: particle deposits accumulate in areas with high traffic volumes, posing a danger to both people and the environment. Sturm collected samples of the ephemeral material from around the city and transferred it to his works - a process that lent it visibility and, consequently, an evidentiary character as well.
Sturm’s works for the 15th Triennial of Small Sculpture continue his exploration of human environment relationships. While the two-part Kollision (Collision, 2015) resembles modernist sculpture, it is actually a fragment of steel girder and a drill head the artist found at the Stuttgart 21 construction site. His research revealed that a drilling pile struck a buried stairwell from the 1970s during construction work. The enormous impact deformed the steel, causing the drill head to break. Conveyed within the exhibition space, the found pieces are an impressive testament to the brutality with which humanity penetrates the earth and the forces unleashed in the process. Moreover, the fact that construction workers stumbled on a structural element that had been completely forgotten (despite being just decades old), shows the degree to which humanity has become a geological factor: an influence inscribed in the surrounding environment. What follows is a critique of the separation of “culture” and “nature,” a notion Sturm addresses in Neue Qualität (New Quality, 2019) as well: a bird’s nest the artist found on the Stuttgart 21 construction site was built exclusively from wire, cable ties and screws - materials of human origin. In the age of the Anthropocene, animal-human relationships are to be understood less in terms of a division of labor than as deeply interdependent, interrelated actions.

Text: Sebastian Schneider; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Erik Sturm takes urban space as his point of departure. For the past several years, the artist has kept a studio in the middle of the construction zone for Stuttgart 21, the city’s “once-in-a-century” railway and development project in the center of the city. Here, he observes the city’s rapid restructuring and the drastic means by which this project is being pushed forward. As an artist, Sturm focuses on phenomena that, despite their extreme significance, would usually seem marginal or escape the attention of the city’s inhabitants. He has spent a great deal of time working with fine dust, for example: particle deposits accumulate in areas with high traffic volumes, posing a danger to both people and the environment. Sturm collected samples of the ephemeral material from around the city and transferred it to his works - a process that lent it visibility and, consequently, an evidentiary character as well.
Sturm’s works for the 15th Triennial of Small Sculpture continue his exploration of human environment relationships. While the two-part Kollision (Collision, 2015) resembles modernist sculpture, it is actually a fragment of steel girder and a drill head the artist found at the Stuttgart 21 construction site. His research revealed that a drilling pile struck a buried stairwell from the 1970s during construction work. The enormous impact deformed the steel, causing the drill head to break. Conveyed within the exhibition space, the found pieces are an impressive testament to the brutality with which humanity penetrates the earth and the forces unleashed in the process. Moreover, the fact that construction workers stumbled on a structural element that had been completely forgotten (despite being just decades old), shows the degree to which humanity has become a geological factor: an influence inscribed in the surrounding environment. What follows is a critique of the separation of “culture” and “nature,” a notion Sturm addresses in Neue Qualität (New Quality, 2019) as well: a bird’s nest the artist found on the Stuttgart 21 construction site was built exclusively from wire, cable ties and screws - materials of human origin. In the age of the Anthropocene, animal-human relationships are to be understood less in terms of a division of labor than as deeply interdependent, interrelated actions.

Text: Sebastian Schneider; englische Übersetzung: Amy Patton

Neue Qualität, 2019
Courtesy: Erik Sturm, Foto: Erik Sturm