Car finish on epoxy resin
125 × 99 × 99 cm
Purchase made possible by Iwan & Monika Ackermann and First Advisory Group
Six uniform, tapered pentagons are arranged on the surface of an equilateral triangle to form a uniform body that is enclosed by an equilateral triangle at the top too. The eight surfaces of this body known as a polyhedron are coated with a glassy car finish. Depending on the direction of light and the viewer's position, the surfaces shimmer in different colours: in shades of blue, purple and brown. Approaching the strictly uniform sculpture thus becomes a living process of perception.
The interplay of geometrically defined form and living surface has been a topic of interest to Vaduz-born artist Hanna Roeckle for some time. She falls back on the formal vocab lary of minimalist sculpture, for instance that of Donald Judd, breaking away from this stringency by means of irregularly formed surfaces. In some cases she achieves the vivid elegance of these surfaces by means of material alone, for example thinly varnished wood, in others it is the result of the literally "painterly" fashioning. The unique, individual nature – the characteristic artistic style – of the surface covers the base forms of her objects like a foil.
In her sculpture Aquarius she intensifies this link once more, creating the vivid impression of colour not by means of polychromy or material texture of the surface, but solely by means of the reflection of light in the eye of the beholder. The luminous colour that traditionally stood for the artist's personal style, the gesture in art is predefined in this sculpture by the sumptuously polished surface.
Hanna Roeckle borrowed this particular form of polyhedron from a famous copperplate engraving by Albrecht Dürer from 1514: Melancholia I. In this mysterious engraving that embodies key questions of the artist's self-conception, craftsmanship and creative intellect at the beginning of the Renaissance era, the polyhedron – that has been the subject of many interpretations – occupies a large portion of the left half of the picture. In 2014, five hundred years after Dürer's engraving, Hanna Roeckle affords it the status of an independent artwork.
Robin Hemmer
