Artist: Lukas Schmenger
Exhibition title: Frenetic Youth
Venue: BLOOM, Düsseldorf, Germany
Date: May 20 – June 11, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and BLOOM, Düsseldorf
photographs, the ghostly figures of Lukas Schmenger suggest the moment of the encounter. Their body postures indicate different movement modes that “blend together” or evoke the impression of a “contact”. For example, we may think of dance choreographies or gestures with sexual connotations.
The idea of contact is also evident when we consider the frames: the high reliefs of their surface, at first glance, appear like casts of body parts. In fact, they were created by making casts of body traces that were pressed into clay. Immaterial, fleeting traces, “afterimages” of the movement of bodies, were transferred to the material by means of sculptural techniques and create modified, seemingly otherworldly physiognomies.
The fascination with the existence of the soul and the idea of the mind connects Lukas Schmenger’s works with the tradition of the symbolists.
“Next to uncertainty always put a certitude.”2
As per Corot’s advice to Redon, Lukas Schmenger experiments ceaselessly with the expressive potential of the soul and the transposition of its realm of ideas into the content material.
1[1] Redon, Odilon: Selbstgespräch-Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen 1867–1915, Munich 1986, p. 31.
2[1] ib., p. 31.
