Sabine Schirdewahn
Artistic work
Curated exhibitions
Commissioned photography
About
Privacy Policy
Sculpture installation, Chapel Weitendorf, 1998
The Return
(abridged version)
A figure lies on a two-part wooden pedestal, similar in shape to a sarcophagus or altar – and yet it is not a reclining figure: rather, the drapery and the overall posture suggest that it must be a standing figure that has fallen over or been laid on the pedestal. Laid down and not lying down, as if it had been deposited, laid out as a sculpture for further treatment or restoration – for on closer inspection one notices traces of decay or signs of a lack of completion. This work was first presented in a former chapel (in Weitendorf), and it was of course not surprising to find the figure group of the Virgin and Child, but it was surprising to find it on a pedestal, unfinished or damaged. In this way, an ancestral pictorial form of religious belief was returned to its proper place, namely a (former) church interior, not in the sense of a historical reconstruction, but in the name of art.
To create an aura of seriousness and tranquillity, to regenerate an atmosphere of reverence, sublimity and mystery, such as a believer once felt in a church, it is precisely art that is called for, for it is obviously art that has found a home today for feelings of a sublime, if not sacred, tone. In this respect, it is not only remarkably consistent that a former chapel becomes a space for art in general, as is the case at the site of the installation in Weitendorf, but Sabine Schirdewahn reflects this consistency in her work when she transposes a formerly religious pictorial form – that of the figure of the Virgin Mary – into a form of art.
Whereas in Classicism it was antique statues that inspired flights of contemplation and promised a special intimacy, in Romanticism it was the Middle Ages that were favoured.
Sabine Schirdewahn’s allusion to a Gothic figure of the Virgin Mary also harks back to this past epoch. At the same time, a stylistic device that characterises many of Schirdewahn’s sculptures is more akin to Classicism: her forms and figures are not coloured but presented in shades of white. White, however, distances itself from other colours, from the diversity and colourfulness of the everyday world, proclaiming something sublime and elitist. At the same time, however, it is also an expression of the fragmentary, since both ancient and medieval sculptures were originally painted, and thus far removed from the neutrality and indefiniteness of white. The preoccupation with processes of auratisation, indeed the creation of atmospheres of austerity and sublimity, is a fundamental theme of Schirdewahn’s art in general. Her work with the figure of the Virgin Mary, for example, is about reclaiming the sacred in a once-sacred space, with the point being that this reclaiming is achieved precisely by breaking with traditional form.
Wolfgang Ullrich 1997
Translation: Gérard A. Goodrow