Bodo Korsig’ssculptures catch you
between things – between line and
form, between drawing and object,
between ostensibly incompatible esthet-
ic principles, between „love“ and „biolo-
gy.“ Out of a flat composite wood
Korsig produces cellular and organic
shapes that combine the serial regulari-
ty and reductionism of Minimalism with
a febrile, brooding sensibility with
ancestral links to German
Expressionism. At once readable as
drawing and three-dimensional sculp-
ture, Korsig’s objects keep you bounc-
ing between the two distinct if insepara-
ble registers:
line/form/line/form/line/form…. Korsig’s
line jiggles and jangles; it registers as
emotional, maybe nervous, or even
neurotic. It is a controlled, active –
mindful – line, but it is at the same time
alloyed to a form seemingly possessed
of an organic logic of its own. Korsig’s
usually wall mounted objects are, after
all, organic forms – biological, cellular,
molecular, schematic evocations of the
kind of structures that exist at a level
where osmosis and symbiosis are more
than metaphors. These are familiar
images; they’re part of our GSA- our
General Scientific Awareness.
Whatis Korsig doing at this intersec-
tion, this complex of in-between states?
He’s meditating on love. With a smile
he calls love „a superpower“, for the
way he feels it rules us with absolute
and reason-overriding authority. He has
been consistently interested in the evo-
cation of relationships: early in his
career, in the mid and late eighties,
Korsig made paintings and drawings
that presented juxtaposed male and
female figures in jagged, physically and
psychologically disjointed states. His
current work is about his ongoing fasci-
nation with the power of love, for both ill
and good; but it avoids the face and the
body, those classic, not to say clicheed,
mirrors of emotion, romantic and other-
wise. Korsig may be a tormented
romantic, but he is also a materialist.
Neurotic helplessness and fatalism
aside, his sense of how things work, his
we-are-our-bodies materialism, drive
him to the register of the microscopic,
the cellular, the biochemichal, the bits
of jelly in the skull where the atavistic
stirrings take hold and where the root of
„love“ must reside. See for example,
Metamorphoses (2003), a receptor-
looking single cell branching out tor-
tured tendrils
Bornin East Germany in 1962, Korsig
trained and worked as a stone-cutter in
the eighties, moving to west Berlin
when the Wall fell. His earliest sculp-
tures reference artisanal tools that
seem to relate to his training and work
as a stone-cutter. By the late nineties
Korsig had evolved his current sculptur-
al and graphic vocabulary, with its cellu-
lar-biochemical references. Dividing his
time between New York and Europe,
the 42-year-old Korsig does most of his
work in his studio in Trier, Germany.
Sculptures, aside, Korsig makes wood-
cuts, artisanal books, and other prints.
The large-scale woodcut technique
requires an extraordinary amount of pres-
sure to print, hence the use of the steam-
roller as a press, which he regularly oper-
ates outside the studio.
Thewoodcuts on canvas and other prints
are also stages for cells, tendrils, recep-
tors, and vesicles. But in his printwork
Korsig tends to let words and phrases
also sprout, like so many accompanying
label-slogans for the slide-flat and starkly
black forms that populate its surfaces.
These phrases are abject: My Soul is
Dirty; Love Cancer; I Do Without; etc. The
loaded words (no less than the loaded
line)read like symptoms.