Hubertus Hamm, Susanne Roewer – Make It Your Own Story

Galerie Kornfeld is happy to present Make It Your Own Story, featuring new works by Susanne Roewer and Hubertus Hamm.

“Make it your own story” — the title of the exhibition is a call for participation. A work of art can only unfold its power and affect the viewer as long as it is perceived, thus becoming part of one’s own story.

Susanne Roewer and Hubertus Hamm are highly interested in materials and their distinctive properties. Deliberate yet playful, they consciously shape the different materials, putting the latter’s specific traits at the service of their art.

Susanne Roewer combines the fragile material of glass—magically formed in fire—with stone, one of the earliest artistic materials. Using hammer and chisel, the artist shapes the hard stone, created by the earth over many thousands of years. The deliberate physical force applied by the artist elicits form from matter. Through the combination with glass, which is created by mixing, heating, melting, shaping, and then carefully cooling different substances, two conflicting materials collide, forming a fragile new entity. According to the artist, her works owe as much to the history of mankind as to small everyday stories. Immaterial ideas are given contemporary material expression.

Hubertus Hamm also utilizes the physical power of the body. For his series Molded Mirrors, he deforms thin, rectangular steel plates. Three-dimensional objects emerge, protruding from the surface into space. The heavy steel, which the artist brings into the desired form with tremendous physical force, is initially given a coloured reflective surface by means of an alchemical refinement process.

Hubertus Hamm is a trained photographer who already ventured into unexplored artistic territory with his “Utility Photographs”, commissioned by major editorial departments, advertising agencies, and global companies. In Molded Mirrors, he tears down the boundaries between the two-dimensional photograph of an object and the three-dimensional photographic object. As an inversion of what photography actually is, these works constitute a liquefied, permanently changing reflection of the world that cannot be fixed. They show fleeting, perpetually new images—different for everyone and only visible when the work is looked at—thus becoming part of one’s own story.