Artist Registry


The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.




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a → d e → h i → l m → p q → t u → x y → z


Angela Kehlenbeck
Bremen DE
Updated: 2023-10-22 07:57:04

STATEMENT OF WORK

ARTIST STATEMENT


I choose a moment in time and let the sculpture tell its story. 

The small human figures I have been working on are bodies I know, scenes I remember or imagine, that have touched and influenced my life. 

Working on these delicate sculptures - which are made of simple wire, tape, glue and (deliberately selected) newspaper clippings from NYT and ZEIT - is a slow process. Shaping the figure and tenderly tracing the nuances of this person's body and posture opens up new spaces of deep understanding and empathy for her story, for the fragility of human existence and its resilience. 

Very personal works are created in which I deal with a part of my history, with my family, with myself or with scenes I envision – while transferring these personal stories into sculptures that, in their intriguing vividness, tell of complex human conditions such as exhaustion and withdrawal, of tense concentration, of a life-defining step, of balance and weightlessness or of calm clarity. 

 

THOUGHTS ON MATERIAL

I am fascinated by the fragility of the delicate sculptures, their (possibly limited) lifespan, which also raises questions about my age, my own finitude. Important to me in my artistic work is always the tension between imperfection and precise detail. The technique I have developed gives the human figures both a fragile lightness and an amazingly strong presence.

My preoccupation with past and present is deeply rooted in the scenes and themes I explore with my sculptures. The newsprint is also an important factor here, the choice of content, the words - it plays in the context of the tension between then and now.

German and American newspapers, ZEIT and NYT, reflect my existence in the two cultures, my confrontation with events and perspectives in both countries, my rootedness in both and at the same time my uprootedness in the constant shifting between the two.