DATE: 26/02/2014 to 18/05/2014
‘Cosy Confusions’
An installation by Clemens Behr
in BOX, LYNfabrikken.
As mostly working site-specific, the attempt of merging a work to architecture or visual attributes of a space is a foundation of Behr´s sculptural work. In this case, those attributes of space can be set through designing a background in advance. Further, following the concept of BOX, they are bound on the idea of a carpet design.
A carpet comes with the attributes of mostly being used indoors and being a cosy addition in housing. Designing a carpet doesn’t have to break these facts, as it is being used in a quiet small and warm place. So the design of a carpet could be done in a classical manner, bringing a decorative warm touch to a interior place.
So with the background now being set, the sculptural work will be able to grow on site adopting itself to the cosy room. Sometimes camouflaged as furniture that won’t work out.
Walking on a thin line between design and fine art, Behrs work partly deals with the function, non-function and pseudo-function of artworks. As always being a game of time and effort in materials available and their best use, the installation in BOX will be improvised and adopted to the conditions the space brings.
The only rules in this semi-performative process set are: the work should create confusion in optical layers, merge background and sculpture and be mostly consist of hanging modules that circulate and create a moving image to the street.
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Clemens Behr was born in 1985 in the German city of Koblenz. He graduated in graphic design from the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, and he now lives and works in Berlin where he is also studying sculpture at the Udk, Berlin. His work can be defined somewhere between design and sculpture. It is also rooted somewhere between graffiti and street skateboard culture. Clemens Behr’s public work makes reference to an exploration of urban architecture, which holds main characteristics from both cultures. Reusing, claiming or just painting in a very playful way, Clemens Behr brings together the selected space of work along with the characteristics of the chosen materials.
The working process mostly brings together a rough draft and a load of prepared parts that are eventually assembled into a “final product”. Like a simple paper or wood collage, or other basic building materials are taken apart and then rearranged into mostly abstract pieces, resembling three-dimesional paintings or even compositions in space. Most of the works are in situ installations, which describe given space in a deconstructive way. Single architectural parts, shapes, colors and surfaces are detached and then reassembled. Most of the times, this process works quite intuitively, prompting viewer and participants.. Most of the installations do not last longer than a couple of week, sometimes days or even hours. Until present, the documentation of his work is a main part of the product, whereby the perception of a voluminous work becomes crystalized in a cubist and flat composition of a background, and a created body of work whose layers continuously melt.
