Benjamin Hirte at Layr

“Sculpture in public spaces oscillates between works with explicit artistic aspirations, decorative architectural elements, and aesthetically exaggerated infrastructure. It can take on representational tasks and reformulate traditional iconographies, or can reach into the social sphere to create identity. Such sculptures are regularly integrated into larger programs and ideologies, for which the individual work is as much a means to an end as an independent artistic manifestation. Articulating its implicit function in differentiated topoi—the fountain, the monument, the facade decoration—sculpture often loses its historical superstructure over the course of time. It then presents itself as merely the furnishing of urban space or as commissioned art of the past—decorative, decontextualized, and yet still an expression of an extensive cultural-political will to shape.

In his work, Benjamin Hirte deals with such sculptural elements as aesthetically transformed functionality and as ideologized monument. He is interested in their integration into urban space as well as their formal genealogy—how they are charged with local social and political functions, and how these functions have been aesthetically transformed. More specifically, he investigates the lines of conflict in the history of progressive urban design between a radical, modernist formal language and a more accessible realist aesthetic. Vienna, where Hirte has lived since his studies, with its long tradition of social housing and the art programs associated with it, provides a rich source for his research, which finds resonance in numerous works, or can serve as a background for dealing with public art projects commissioned in other places, such as in the United States, and their inherent contradictions. […]”

Excerpt from a text by Vanessa Joan Müller