Otto Boll, Space Walk

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Otto Boll’s new solo exhibition, Space Walk, which covers the gallery’s entire 21^st floor. With suspended, seemingly floating sculptures, Boll calls for interaction and dialogue with the works, which can only be experienced through examination, approach, repositioning, and a changed perspective. Boll’s creations oscillate between presence and absence, the seen and the unseen, suggesting both materiality and the void.

One determinant of my work is my discontent with the established visions on the world around; it cannot be possible, that what we see is all we can see and will see. A new vision cannot simply originate from things perceived, cannot be achieved just by the synthesis of values drawn from previous experience. I intend to search for what I hope to find: The visible not yet visible; spatial expansion of thought and feeling. (Otto Boll, 1988)

A void, be it an old stairwell or an industrial gallery space, is for Boll a beginning. “There is nothing and from this point, you have to start anew,” he says. It is like a search for the unknown or travelling to a new destination. Something emerges from the void, which was previously only in the artist’s mind.

From past training as a glider pilot, since the 1970s Boll has been keenly interested in perceptions, in a complete image of something that can only be gotten through renewed attention and through sharing space and time. The tranquil interplay of lines with which Boll fills the gallery can be considered only this way – as a sculptural event to which he invites us. It is rarely clear exactly where the lines made of aluminium and steel begin or end, only the approach can help in understanding. “Only their proximity can bring about a pristine experience,” says Boll. Most of these sculptures are untitled; some are called “Helix”, referring to the shape of a snail’s shell that also characterises the works, but also to the spiral that follows the pattern of the viewer’s thoughts.

The way the sculptures present themselves is part of the mystery: hanging almost invisibly from thin threads of nylon. These sculptures must be as light as possible and thus consist of a hollow part, although it is impossible to perceive how the lines change from full to hollow and vice versa. Other works then balance on a pedestal, or a stone or wooden structure. One sculpture from 2014 is composed of reflective aluminium, mirroring the surrounding reality. Another from 2008 consists of a black wooden curved beam, from which a white chalk line appears to float.

This exhibition also features a Super 8 video work dating from 1980. The spatiality, the experience of reality through distance and close-up, and the finding of the protagonist in a relationship other than the usual three-dimensional one, has remained constant in his work. In 1975, Boll made “Flute Drawings”, almost strictly geometric patterns of light and dark, where only on reading the title does it become apparent that the light sources are the openings for the mouth and fingers. It is a statement by the artist, an expression of the power of the mind. With black chalk and paper, Boll managed to go where one otherwise could not. The 1980 Super 8 film, “Paper Bag Film”, builds on this idea, though here the mental availability is translated into a physical one. Returning from the habitual act of going to the bakery, Boll asked about being the inside of the bread bag, an object that otherwise presents itself as merely functional and disposable, and a simple act with which he once again succeeds in questioning spatiality and perception.

With his sensitive works, Boll places himself in an intriguing continuum of artists who engaged in dialogue with spatiality and space itself. Shortly after the turn of the century, constructivists like Naum Gabo, inspired by encounters with the inventor of X-rays and uncovering inner structures behind the façade, stripped sculptures of their unwieldy, monolithic, and bulky nature - dematerialising, as it were, abandoning the concrete thing-in-itself. After World War II, artists sought spatiality and the infinite, with Saburō Murakami or Lucio Fontana making indentations and hollows in the two-dimensional surface of a canvas on paper. In a radical gesture of the void and the immaterial in art, ‘space painter’ Yves Klein saw the sky as his studio, just as Otto Boll seems to employ the space of a gallery as a surface for intervening with a play of lines.

Meanwhile, in the Americas, several sculptors, including Alexander Calder, Ruth Asawa, and Gego, delved into the idea of drawing in space. The latter built sculptures from the late 1950s onwards with an ingenious yet ethereal and organic character, constructed from an interlaced interplay of lines unfolding in space. In 1976, shortly before Boll started what would become his signature oeuvre, Gego made her Dibujos sin papel (Drawings without paper), installed hanging from nylon, close to the wall, hinting at the idea of movement and illusion.

With all these artists, the idea of kinetic movement was part of the very being of the works themselves – a common application of ‘line’ in 1970s art, including in the case of two-dimensional work like Bridget Riley’s undulating ‘curve paintings’. Boll’s works, however, are hushed in their honest simplicity, and place the action of movement with the visitor: it is through dialogue and interaction, through walking around them and underneath them that only an understanding of the works can emerge. The search for the beginning and end of the meandering lines demands movement, even after which the sculptures keep part of their secret.

The interaction and resonance of human beings and material is reminiscent of the philosophy of Lee Ufan, who, also in the 1970s, started his series “From Line”. “Load the brush and draw a line,” he said, about a series of lines gradually disappearing into ‘nothingness’ – a transformative process of reduction and saturation. The pigment seems to evaporate before the viewer’s eyes, just as Boll’s lines seem to dissolve. Lee calls the space between the lines and between the parts of his well-known sculptures, yohaku, the open site of power – “the air around the work, rather than the work itself, takes on density, and the site where these objects are placed vividly reveals itself as an open world.”

Boll’s lines are like tones of music – the resonance of a stringed instrument that disappears when the string stops vibrating. The void dividing the works is like silence between notes, making the composition legible. The multiplicity of number, direction, and shapes reads like a polyphony, tranquil yet musical. Boll invites us to his sculptural event, as a conductor does in a theatre.

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Otto Boll lives and works in the German city of Krefeld, one of the artistic hubs in the Lower Rhine region, known for its Mies van der Rohe buildings. From 1975 to 1980, he studied at the Münster branch of the well-known Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His professor was Ernst Hermanns, whose artistic motive was to make time, space, and movement tangible. In 1980, Boll won the five-yearly Caspar-Ritter-von-Zumbusch-Preis, after which several important German art prizes would follow. In 1997, Boll built a fountain at the German consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. One year later, Boll had a major solo exhibition in Houston, TX, at the Goethe Institut (the institute encouraging international cultural exchange and relations). Boll had several solo and group exhibitions throughout the past decades. Currently, his work can be seen in group exhibitions at Haus Lange, Krefeld; Wind H Art Centre in Beijing; and the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tempere, Finland. From the latter museum, Boll’s work is part of the collection. Other public collections that include his work include Deutsche Bank Collection, Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; the McNay Art Museum, TX; and Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, The Netherlands. Following his exhibition at Skulpturenpark Walfrieden / Tony Cragg Foundation in 2019, König Books released the publication, Otto Boll. Sculptures. A new monograph annex artist publication will appear in 2024.