‘What strikes me with metal as a material is its resistance. Metal seems to me like a stubborn interlocutor and the attempt to change it by pushing and bending involves a certain energy and power. The material demands patience, as it needs to be persuaded into acquiescence while it rigidly proclaims itself as unalterable. When the metal is bent physically, the energy of bending remains apparent.’
Matisse Blau and Barriere (both 2010) rest on plinths and are far sturdier than the more precarious shapes of his previous works. ‘The earlier sculptures such as Untitled (2004) are static and resemble figures. There is a constant notion of a singular unity that continues throughout the working process.’
Thomas Kiesewetter makes elegant abstract sculptures in which an industrial material, sheet metal, is playfully bent, folded and imbued with organic, almost human characteristics. Bolted together and painted in bold colours, his sculptures are reminiscent of modernist architectural shapes, as much as they make us conscious of the solidity of their single material. These angular works, unified by their material and their colour, look as if they have been frozen in action, caught mid-stride in their slightly neurotic articulation.
The newer works push the material and formal qualities of metal further, collapsing what look like architectonic quotations and modernist atelier icons, and at the same time ironically redefining the connotations of his material – from rigid hardness, strength and industrial alienation, to something more pliable, harmless and life-like.
Matisse Blau and
Barriere have more of a flow and momentum. In these sculptures I tried to capture something of the lightness of Henri Matisse’s paper cut-outs against the heaviness of the metal.’
