Agnes Lammert & Sebastian Maas – Distant Belongings

68projects welcomes 2023 with a duo exhibition by artists Agnes Lammert (born 1984 in Dresden) and Sebastian Maas(born 1984 in Aachen) titled Distant Belongings.

Agnes Lammert presents sculptures in which something appears to be packed or wrapped, yet whose contents can never be determined with certainty. They seem as if they could be wet and heavy. The outlines of the cloth-wrapped forms are reminiscent of human bodies, thus suggesting the absence of people. Or are they ghosts, moulded from plaster? Her sense of physicality and draping is evident, for example, in the hanging sculpture hoist the rag in space. Inspired by dance forms such as Japanese Butoh, states of movement—holding, falling, rising, improvising—are perceptible in her work.

Some of Lammert’s sculptures appear as if scorched by intense heat, featuring virtuously draped materiality reminiscent of the late Gothic artist Veit Stoß, who serves as a source of inspiration for the sculptor. For his wooden figures of the Virgin Mary, found in churches in Nuremberg and Kraków, Stoß transformed wood into seemingly soft fabric. Starting from fabricated models, Lammert is interested in the in-between spaces—the voids created during the sculptural moulding process—which she fills with wax, plaster, concrete, plastics, or bronze.

The sepia-toned monkey portraits are by Sebastian Maas, painted in oil on truck tarpaulin—a technique characteristic of his practice. He juxtaposes these primates with large-scale works that reference well-known hunting scenes by the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. The lion and hippopotamus hunts pulse like a feverish LSD dream.

The primates belong to an ongoing series in which the artist has painted monkey species (there are approximately 500 known species), many of which are endangered and may become extinct in the near future. Are humans to blame—and can this be prevented? Science is a fundamental interest for the Berlin-based artist. Before turning to painting, Maas studied biology and neuroscience at LMU Munich.

His interests in nature and diverse forms of human life are reflected in his collages, mostly large-format paintings that incorporate references to contemporary consumer culture, queer life, and art history. Gender roles are explored in his portraits by painterly morphing his own face with the silhouettes and bodies of mostly female figures. His self-portrait can be seen here, alongside processes of identification and confrontation with the ever-changing figure—echoing approaches found in the work of Cindy Sherman.

The many silent observers in Sebastian Maas’s paintings possess something enigmatic and mysterious—revealing as little as the unseen elements within Agnes Lammert’s sculptures.