Gehard Demetz
∗1972, Italy
lives and works in Selva Gardena, Italy
Gehard Demetz is a sculpture. His material is mostly wood, his subject the human being. When looking at the predominantly childlike sculptures, one gets the feeling that the artist strives less to depict the physical than the inner life, indeed the consciousness and subconsciousness of human existence. At first glance, the childlike nature of his creatures makes them attractive, worthy of protection, but a cool distance, an effect as if frozen, stands in the way of an emotional approach. While the body and clothing are still rough and show traces of the working process, the surfaces of the faces or hands are perfectly smooth and perfectly formed. This too makes the figures unapproachable. They are children, aware of their existence, appearing adult or precocious, perhaps also at the emotionally charged transition from child to adult. As vulnerable but also hurtful beings, their sometimes offensive poses and gestures make them seem hostile and touchingly helpless at the same time. The sculptures, made of lime wood, do not come from one block, but are assembled from many individual parts in a modular fashion. Open seams, cuboidal omissions and missing parts, as well as the volume-shaped, unfinished back sections reveal the sculptural working process of becoming. At the same time, however, they also symbolise the fractures of consciousness, the various parts and set pieces that make up personality and individuality - a process that is never complete. Gehard Demetz irritates with bronze figures of the dictators Hitler and Mao. They, too, bear childlike facial features. The black lacquered works are casts of two wooden sculptures that Demetz created in 2007. Compared to the wood, the bronze has a different surface and feel. In addition, the casting process is made tangible: small stubbles left over from the bronze casting are still visible everywhere. These children seem small and innocent, but at the same time also sinister and threatening. Are we looking at two children or the future dictators? Looking at them gives us a queasy feeling, because the physiognomy of their faces makes it easy to recognise the future dictators and suggests that the future course of life is already determined in childhood. But perhaps it is also the banality of evil that has taken on material form through these dictators who have "shrunk" into dwarfs. But does guilt become smaller when the human being is reduced in size and meets us as a seemingly innocent child? More questions than answers arise the longer one is exposed to the sculptures. Demetz invites the viewer to approach the sculptures with his own experience and background and to find his own interpretation.
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