ESSAY Reiner Mahrlein

REINER MÄHRLEIN                                                            By Wim Roefs

Reiner Mährlein mostly uses steel, granite and paper, the first two for his sculptures, all three for his prints.  From these basic, somewhat raw materials, he makes smart, elegant, beautiful works of art. Interaction between mass and openness, weight and lightness, flatness and three-dimensional space and organic and constructed qualities characterizes much of his work.  “These materials and the relationship between them,” Mährlein says, “create spatial tension -- a contest, as it were, between conflict and togetherness.”

            “In many of my sculptures, the interaction between the three-dimensional objects made from welded flat steel plates and the stones’ mass creates varying spatial and architectural environments.” Little Cube III and IV in the current exhibition are small-scale models of such sculptures, many of which Mährlein has turned into large public sculptures in Germany. “In these situations,” Mährlein says, “the steel plates, because of their particular properties, keep their flat-surface qualities, which is accentuated by the linear, often frame-like patterns of the welded seams. The stone mass, on the other hand, with its rough surface and relief structure, always intervenes in the space.”

            In his small, all-bronze cubes such as Inside II and IV, Mährlein maintains the interaction between mass and openness and heaviness and lightness, but the weight shifts. Instead of a solid piece of stone intervening in the center space of a steel construction, thin sheets or fluttering flakes of bronze occupy the sculptures’ airy center. Almost by default, the legs and bars making up the cubes’ external skeletal structure gain in weight.

            In Blues and Pfluge (Plough), two larger sculptures that Mährlein created in Columbia in 2003, the flatness of steel plates is missing. Instead, beams represent the steel element, not creating space for granite to intervene in but itself intervening in space with the granite. “I worked with whatever materials I had,” Mährlein says, “and adjusted my concept while still working with granite and steel.”

            In many of Mährlein’s sculptures, granite typically provides the solid, heavy mass. In his prints, on the other hand, granite – or, rather, its imprint – provides the light touch, even a sense of floating, while simultaneously still providing a three-dimensional element to an otherwise two-dimensional work of art. His prints are part rust prints, from pressing metal plates onto the paper, and part embossing, the result of pressing wet paper onto stone surfaces.

            The procedure creates abstract works with a rich and rough, architectural quality in which the imprint of the steel and the embossing from the stone interact much as both materials do in Mährlein’s sculpture.            “The three-dimensionality of the prints is not just suggested through linear patterns, surface, and color values,” Mährlein says. “The embossed paper actually intervenes in a sculptural fashion in the surroundings.”

March 2008