Christof Zwiener’s space occupied by fragile string sculptures as invasions of irritating (un)ambiguousnesses. His piece “textum” concludes this year’s program “Can this be true?”

Christof Zwiener precisely measures spaces with yarn, joins the individual lines to form a fine net that he in turn subdivides into blackened routes. Perspective weavings develop while striding through the spaces. Drawings emerge, peter out, and constantly change. Ludwig Seyfahrt describes them “as visual images at the border of disappearance,” as “attempts to bestow mental imaginations or characterizations that one defines as recollective images with a suitable ephemeral clearness.”

Christof Zwiener in fact often works with art historical and contemporary references. The piece “Starting at Zero” in the Bonn Kunstverein (2007) for example makes reference to “WTC Tapestry,” a tapestry commissioned from Joan Miró in 1974 in the entrance hall of the World Trade Center. In this case, Zwiener is interested in the reconstruction of the vanished, a flared up recollection of something that is no longer tangible which has returned in a ghostly fashion. His precarious constructions appear as fragments of memory, as a haunting “intermediate stage” on the rocks, as the quiet echo of a vaguely perceived sound. The chain of associations suggested in the title lays down (false) clues by setting an origin. It appears as a picture puzzle of a concrete topographical location, a terrain steeped in history inscribed in consciousness and as a ground zero, the place of obliteration and new beginning at which the past shines through.

The piece “textum” developed for the Kunstverein is aimed at this very fusion of levels of meaning and again reflects upon his own artistic practice. The title plays with the common etymology of the words textile and text from the Latin word “textum” meaning “woven fabric.” It is the material as well as linguistic fabric that Zwiener’s piece enmeshes. Panels of fabric form the background, the two-dimensional texture of the space. Unrestricted threads are braced in front of it forming three-dimensional textiles, form new spatial textures that interweave with the cultural references into a textual space that can open up while striding through it.

Christof Zwiener (born 1972) studied from 1998 to 2004 at the HBK Braunschweig under Prof. Raimund Kummer. Solo exhibitions in the Kunstvereins in Bonn (2006/07), Ulm (2005) and Ravensburg (2004) as well as numerous European group exhibitions. Christof Zwiener’s works can presently also be seen in the Galerie Elly Brose-Eiermann and the Schürmann Collection in Berlin.