Pierre Klossowski and Carl Andre at KIRCHGASSE

Artists: Pierre Klossowski and Carl Andre

Exhibition title: A floor piece for silence

Venue: KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn, Switzerland

Date: July 27 – September 8, 2018

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and KIRCHGASSE, Steckborn

The title of the exhibition “A floor piece for silence ” refers to a “Dipole” sculpture by the American artist Carl Andre. The two steel and aluminium base plates are examples of the sculp-tural work that made Andre one of the most influential figures of American Minimal Art in the mid-1960s. Far less well-known is that Andre began his artistic career as a poet. Between 1960 and 1965, he created a comprehensive body of visual “concrete” poetry. The intensive examination of the symbolic and material quality of letters, numbers and words are discernable in his series of the “Philosophical Objects (ABC)” and in his “Prime” sculptures. Andre’s use of the material quality of language – far from metaphors and syntactic constructs – can be regarded as a foretelling of the dry systematics of his constructions and his pragmatic use of unprocessed materials, and illustrates the equivalence of the sculptural and poetic in his art.

The second artist represented in this exhibition, Pierre Klossowski, was a member of the circle surrounding André Gide and Georges Bataille and became famous in the 1970s as a philosopher, translator and novelist. In addition to his philosophical and literary work, Klossowski created-largely unknow to a broader public – an extraordinary body of drawings. His works on paper usually depict life-size erotic scenes rich with mythological, allegorical and philosophical references. With a concentrated repertoire of figures and a sophisticated grammar of gestures and attitudes, Klossowski developed a far-reaching and limitless concept of eroticism beyond moral and religious dogma, situated between regimentation and inhibition, sexual and spiritual ecstasy.

Presented at the exhibition at Kirchgasse are “Philosophical objects” and “Prime” sculptures by Carl Andre, as well as early, large-scale lead and colored pencil drawings by Pierre Klossowski.