Otto Boll「Space Walk」Axel Vervoordt

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Otto Boll’s new solo exhibition, Space Walk, which covers the gallery’s entire 21st floor. With suspended, seemingly floating sculptures, Boll calls for interaction and dialogue with the works, which can only be experienced through examination, approach, repositioning, and a changed perspective. Boll’s creations oscillate between presence and absence, the seen and the unseen, suggesting both materiality and the void.

This exhibition also features a Super 8 video work dating from 1980. The spatiality, the experience of reality through distance and close-up, and the finding of the protagonist in a relationship other than the usual three-dimensional one, has remained constant in his work. In 1975, Boll made “Flute Drawings”, almost strictly geometric patterns of light and dark, where only on reading the title does it become apparent that the light sources are the openings for the mouth and fingers. It is a statement by the artist, an expression of the power of the mind. With black chalk and paper, Boll managed to go where one otherwise could not. The 1980 Super 8 film, “Paper Bag Film”, builds on this idea, though here the mental availability is translated into a physical one. Returning from the habitual act of going to the bakery, Boll asked about being the inside of the bread bag, an object that otherwise presents itself as merely functional and disposable, and a simple act with which he once again succeeds in questioning spatiality and perception.