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Disembodied Room-Signs

About Jürgen Buhre’s sculptural objects

Jürgen Buhre’s painting displays the union of colour spaces recalling the informal of figure-like beings. There are narrative elements showing up from within expressive coloured worlds, creating an inseparable unity of emotional composition and purely painterly forms.

Jürgen Buhre first began experimenting with objects towards the end of the 1990ies. He isolates the line-like beings from his paintings. They abandon the inner pictorial and colour spaces to enter real space. They are of slim and linear shape, formed from rusty reinforcing steel. These beings almost entirely remain on one level. They are often reduced to a single visual angle and frequently require the surrounding space as a visual support.

From within the paintings emerging over the following years, Jürgen Buhre achieves a new inner pictorial spatiality. The figures surrender their clearly defined space to a new spatiality. In some paintings these beings appear in an almost brief manner, just as to dive into the colour again. Thus his paintings are kept in a perpetual inner pictorial movement.

Again Jürgen Buhre begins experimenting with sculptural objects. Small initial models made out of rods are created, fixating a spontaneous expression. The transposition into large scale objects takes place by using massive steel rods of varying strength. These are heated and made mouldable. During the lengthy work process of heating and re-cooling the steel rods are frequently twisted and bent until they finally become self-feeding sculptural objects.

During the process of working on his pieces, also due to the brittle material, the forms of these objects gradually change, oriented towards the models. Jürgen Buhre achieves a spontaneity equalling the process of work in his paintings.

At first sight the objects seem like brief traces sketched into an imaginary space. They seem like playfully drawn lines depicting a faint path in this space. Yet, one who follows this line will become aware of these objects’ spatiality. The rods overlay and overlap, at times they seem like entwined knots placed into the room, at times they look like purely simple linear forms. Yet, they always happen to show with a narrative factor. They describe forms recalling human figures, even though they may not be discovered as such at a second glance.

Some loop-shaped forms may be interpreted as head-like. The loose ends of the bars aim at the room, they possibly become the limbs of human figures. Jürgen Buhre’s sculptural objects may always be interpreted as being figurative ones. They enter the room in a sketch-like way. They don’t describe the lines of a silhouette, instead they reduce the bodily form to a line, often leaving uncertainty to the exact form, in the end it remains indeterminate. They are subject to perpetual change, depending on both position and perspective of the observer. They virtually withdraw themselves from a single view, as well they don’t allow definite contextual statements. The forms remain open. The works’ titles are mere suggestions or directions to the observer’s thoughts.

Jürgen Buhre’s objects are almost exclusively detached. They deliberately occupy the surrounding space. On the one hand they depict a room placed between the twisted steel rods. Here they appear as possible boundaries of an imaginary corporeality. They depict the possible volumes. At the same time, due to their linearity they deny any possible volume. On the other hand these figures aim at their surrounding space. It is here that they show proof of their own particular spatiality, thoroughly resisting its surrounding space. This interplay taking place between the differing views and interpretations suspends the objects in an ongoing and open motion.

The contextuality of Jürgen Buhre’s objects often conveys moments of motion. His figures remain suspended in an instant in order to seemingly move on from there. They appear as volatile abbreviations in a frozen motion. At times they represent the result of an accurate study, such as in "The Dancer", at times they are almost abstract line-shapes such as in "The Submission".

The observer watching the surface of the rod from across the figurative form will discover a new world filled with traces of labour. Remaining imprints of the pliers, traces of the cooled down heat and of the metal’s twists, all creating an agitated surface structure. These traces also create motion factors on a more detailed scale, corresponding with the figure.

Jürgen Buhre’s objects are of an almost bodiless ease. They are skinny figures, conquering the space and defending themselves against it. At the same time they allow being interpreted as an expression of a differentiated world of emotion. At times as subtle as in "On The Scout", at times rather conclusive as in "Self-Assurance". They allow the observer to find themselves in them or advance to become the observer’s counterpart, challenging the observer to communicate.

Jürgen Buhre’s sculptural objects become bodiless room-signs. They defy any corporeality oriented towards humans. This makes them become almost universal paintings in which human emotion is granted space for expression.

Falko Herlemann