David Fesl at Sperling

Artist: David Fesl

Venue: Sperling, Munich, Germany

Date: May 13 – June 25, 2022

Photography: ©the artist. Courtesy of Sperling, Munich. Photos by Sebastian Kissel

David Fesl’s sculptural objects bear traces of his everyday life, turning the things he uses regularly into abstract fragments. His precise assemblages, of the most diverse things of nature and everyday life are small in size, but in their balanced composition and play with our perceptions of scale and relation, certainly provide a more monumental evocation in their specific universal forms.

Like a jeweler, Fesl combines the organic and the inorganic, object and artifice, in a way that allows radically opposing elements to come together in a surreal yet harmonious way, until a new morphology emerges. A mucus shell and a scrunchie, a peach stone and an earring, an onion skin and a screw.

In these sophisticated configurations, each individual part undergoes a metamorphosis in which one component emerges concisely: its shape, its colour, its texture. Few everyday objects retain their emblematic charge and recognisable functionality. In the fragile, almost ephemeral works, the associations triggered by the constituent objects and their narrative potential, precisely woven together, trace a constellation of experience and sensory arousal.

The gentle eroticism that characterises these works suggests a space beyond fixed attribution: connotations remain variable, evading description, things appear both masculine and feminine. David Fesl frees what he seeks and finds from their preconceived limitations, transforming them into enigmatic forms amongst one another. In an almost painterly way, he infuses the work with his own hand. His sculptural compositions expose and transform the meanings of what constitutes them.
In their amalgamation, which is also inherent in a great craftsmanship, something new emerges, which in its poetic visual language situates itself outside conventional categorisation. The decidedly white surrounding space that provides the framework adds an institutional-critical component to this language.

-Vanessa Joan Müller

David Fesl, 2022, exhibition view, SPERLING, Munich

David Fesl, Untitled, 2021, Cap buckle, spruce wood, banksia leaf, driftwood, thistle thorns, heat shrink tube, rosehip thorns, cotton swab, 16.5×7.3×8.3cm