Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

In the courtyard of the Head Office of the Goethe-Institut in Munich, Olaf Metzel’s Freitreppe (i.e., Outside Staircase) winds itself towards the sky. You can’t climb up it; the steps lead into the void and once you reached the top there would be nowhere to go. The function-deprived staircase is fairly typical of the work of the sculptor Metzel, who was born in 1952 in Berlin. Not infrequently, Metzel constructs his sculptures from found materials. These can be a crowd barrier (Randale-Denkmal, i.e., Riot Monument), discarded stadium seats (Auf Wiedersehen, i.e., Good-Bye) or the complete equipment of a gymnasium (112:104).

In the exhibition Aus der Kurve (i.e., From the Curve), the Heilbronn Art Society is currently showing works by Metzel in the rooms of the Vogelmann Art Gallery. On display are in particular works from the new group called Zeitungsarbeiten (i.e., Newspaper Works). Metzler buckles and crumples aluminium plates and fastens them on the wall in up to four metres wide reliefs. Before doing this, he imprints them with excerpts from current media coverage: on the Italian football player Mario Balotelli, the late singer Amy Winehouse and, on the occasion of his death in 2012, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.