http://www.carliergebauer.com/exhibitions/2256
carlier | gebauer is very pleased to present new sculptures by Asta Gröting on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin opening 1 May, 2015 from 6-9pm. The new work, When My Mother Was Dying (2015), is a continuation of the series Space Between a Family which are casts of the artist‘s family made in 2010, and Space Between Lovers which is a cast of a couple having sex. Seen from the front, the four figures in When My Mother Was Dying appear to be swathed in gently undulating shrouds. Walking around the sculptures, however, reveals direct imprints of each individual’s solemn expression and the rumpled folds and buttons of their clothing – thus enacting a dynamic interplay between the visible and invisible aspects of the primal experience of mourning. „Freud told us that civic monuments and memorials are made to preserve the memory of a traumatic event (war, the loss of human life) and invite us to remember the painful experiences of the past. Gröting continues this conversation by sculpting monuments that preserve the memory of the present, or which ask questions of the present, while inviting us to speculate on a timeless absence- something or someone lost, missing, gone. If it is a celebration and conservation of life, it is also an unsentimental gaze at family relations – the empty but haunted space of all that is unspoken between them. Gröting subverts the visual language we associate with most public monuments, always alert to the difficult task of casting abstract qualities such as thought, dignity, conflict, subjectivity. It is not hard to imagine that these introspective figures possess internal organs, (lungs, hearts, kidneys) but they are uncanny too, mournful grey ghosts of substance who seem to be emerging from both a war and a womb. Gröting is conceptually and emotionally asking questions of the social body by taking something away from it and allowing this absence to do the talking.“
– Deborah Levy