translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
070909: Museum Villa Stuck: Gerwald Rockenschau – Promise versus Reality
Museum Villa Stuck: Gerwald Rockenschau – Promise versus Reality
Gerwald Franz von Rockenschaub
Franz von Stuck must have been an enviable man - especially in his role as the decision-maker among artists at the beginning of the last century. With a magnificent villa in the suburbs of Munich, and an endless coming and going of the representatives of splendour, flamboyance, and pomp encountering those of symbolism and historicism. As well as a selective group of students, handpicked by the artist, among them Paul Klee.
But primarily, to crown his career as a lordly Impresario of art nouveau, with a studio which is capable of positioning sculptures and paintings in the one and only cubic combination-box.
And now, only possible in the Villa Stuck: Gerwald Rockenschaub, the contemporary maestro of elegant hyper-minimalism of the sublime ways of playing/playing fields. Who, at the latest since 1987 and his solo exhibit at the Cologne gallery of Paul Maenz, dared to access the total ensemble and scenario of space and spatiality of art. Reduced to the max! With artistic settings of trans, trance, and cross. Funky and functional. Emotional.
In multimedia Elementarism of the seemingly weightless gesture and light-footed serenity. “Mild and silent?” (Richard Wagner). Not at all. Instead: noble understatement between animation (of the forms) and mediation (among the forms).
On Stuck’s ground-level former sculpture studio (with light coming in from the north) nothing of this vain kitsch can be seen that would correspond to the aesthetic and art-knowledgeable taste of the connoisseurs and their desire from opulence and decadence. As the guest book proves….
But then - quickly up the circular staircase, into the light. Where higher beings in Stuck’s former painting studio might have ordered: withdrawal equals offensive and attack. Where the achievements of the monochrome / monosyllabic painting is sealed into a repressed /dimmed gray. By a wall hanging and in the most neutral tone of colour of all times and all worlds. Murals as (wall) paintings. And the “sound” of the rooms sees itself amused by the sportive stripes of the ornamental ribbons.
Painting today: a sculptural intervention at the loading station of architecture? Or was it the other way around? In any case, Franz von Stuck would have, in the adjacent and now no longer immaculate virgin-room of his daughter, in front of Gerwald Rockenschaub’s reflected object – a veritable tondo, treated himself to a beaker of finest joy with a truant side-glance out the window.
By Stephan Maier
Museum Villa Stuck
81675 Munich, Prinzregentenstr. 60, until 04.10.09
www.villastuck.de
070909
Museum Villa Stuck
81675 München, Prinzregentenstrasse 60
Tel: +49 89 455 55 10, Fax: +49 89 455 55 124
Email: villastuck@muenchen.de
http://www.villastuck.de/
Öffnungszeiten: Mi - So, 11.00 - 18.00
Museum Villa Stuck
81675 München, Prinzregentenstrasse 60
Tel: +49 89 455 55 10, Fax: +49 89 455 55 124
Email: villastuck@muenchen.de
http://www.villastuck.de/
Öffnungszeiten: Mi - So, 11.00 - 18.00