Manfred Pernice

Untitled, 2008

Plywood, china, metal, lacquer, stone
103,6 x ø 118,6 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Neu, Berlin

With Manfred Pernice, what is finished and what is not is in any case not an interesting question: the openness of his constructed and in part paint-coated structures, in their very materiality, expresses a preference for the preliminary over the conclusive, for the approximate, framed as precisely as possible, over the final judgment. The work, as a construction site of sorts or a sketch, confronts the beholder not with an artistic illusion but with concrete aesthetic clues, with possibilities of utopian ideas that have lost none of their effectiveness. As early as 1998, during the first Berlin Biennale, Manfred Pernice showed his “Main and/or Central Can (Haupt- bzw. Zentraldose),” a sculpture fifteen feet tall, as an absolutely megalomaniac possibility, as an ambition and an idea of access, as Zeitgeist. The can-shape made of pressboard, as a container for the form of intellectual possibility, appears in very different shapes in the most recent exhibition: as a pedestal, as an object the size of a stool, as a utopian (or utopian-bombastic) possibility of architecture floating across the room, and as a monumental model in modest dimensions. Interspersed between them everyday objects from an improved conception of bourgeois or, then again, socialist life; be it contemporary china or etageres, a buffet, Hellerau style, from the 30s, or a sectional dresser from the 70s, things from real-life contexts or a grotesque rack (testing device for mobiles) from which sundry found objects are suspended. All these objects together form an abstract assemblage, an intellectual attitude of real objecthood that involves the Schinkel Pavillon and everything on view outside its windows. The perspective is shaped not so much by fictions as by frictions. The unfinished as an opportunity that has at least not yet been missed. (Axel Jablonski)

Manfred Pernice, *1963 Hildesheim, Germany