Kraft der Stille
Susanne Tunn
Anyone who has ever looked into the distance from a mountain peak in the Alps knows the silence of the stone. Anyone who has ever watched waves hit cliffs on cliffs knows the power of stone. Susanne Tunn condenses this power of silence in her partly monumental stone works and allows the stone to tell its own story.
The stone cylinders on the ground floor of the museum may be reminiscent of fragments of columns from a gigantic ancient temple or hewn boulders. But they were pulled from the mountain with great mechanical power. They — each stone in itself with its own personality — have become objects that invite us to interact. The works combine geology, archaeology and our individual psychology of perception. In recognition of nature, she is concerned with recognizing the nature of the stone and exposing it. While for centuries, male-dominated stone sculpture was more about the sculptor's heroic triumph, his showdown with matter and overcoming its resistance was finally celebrated as the conquest of raw nature, today's understanding of art also includes the goodness and power of matter itself. Susanne Tunn reveals this to us in her works and thus also an important female cosmos of sculpture and how to deal with the object in space.
In this work, too, fragment and wholeness, release and memory are combined. This duplicity is perhaps a guide to Susanne Tunn's work.
- Dorothee Bauerle-Willert
While the dark blue-grey of Labrador stone from Norway and Krastal marble from Austria prevails on the ground floor, Susanne Tunn presents the entire series The Great Melancholy for the first time. As in a scientific test setup, the bright sculptures made of Andalusian Macael marble are lined up in complex, geometric shapes that are reminiscent of cutting diamonds. Susanne Tunn created this cycle of works over 30 years from 1990 to 2022 based on Albrecht Dürer's famous Melencolia I.
With the works made of tin on the upper floor, Tunn brings us back to 2015, when she poured out the joints of the floor in the Dominican monastery in Osnabrück with pure, liquid tin. The regular grid of floor joints has become a unique shape, like a fingerprint, and now curves across the floor as if it wanted to free itself from the restriction of its own skin. The fine and sensitive works on paper on the upper floor provide an insight into Susanne Tunn's extensive and distinctive graphic work.
While some of her sculptures explore the limits of what is possible in weight and mass, similar to Alf Lechner, these works on paper, made with ink and pencil, take us, like miniatures, into the sculptor's intellectual cosmos. They allow transparency and lightness and make the graphic objects dance weightlessly.
Susanne Tunn and Alf Lechner had an artistic friendship lasting over 30 years. Influenced by a common understanding of the power of nature, the sensitivity of archaic material, reduction and the balance of mass and space, it was Alf Lechner's express wish to provide her with a comprehensive exhibition of works even after the presentation of Stone Pearls in 2006. It is therefore a particular pleasure for us to be able to fulfill this request now.
Art reveals and creates, and conceals, is order and chaos at the same time. What is beautiful corresponds to and contradicts the observer. It is this tension that Susanne Tunn strictly maintains.
- Jörg Mertin
