Markus Karstiess

Within this minisurvey of Markus Karstiess’s sculptures from 2005–15 is a video of him excavating Robert Smithson’s 1969 asphalt pour in Rome, Was die Erde sieht (With the Eyes of the Earth), 2014. The result of this activity is Karstiess’s Scholar’s Rocks, 2015—a craggy ceramic base cradling fragments of Smithson’s work. That artist’s pours celebrated entropy and gravity, while Karstiess’s clay pieces draw on the primeval energies of this planet. His room-divider-like series, “Dirty Corners,” 2013, is another nod to the Land art master, and certainly Joseph Beuys’s “Fat Corners” of the 1960s. The works stand sentinel-like on the floor, shiny smooth on the outside, while rough-hewn, scraped out, and pockmarked within. It summons up an ancient sense of the natural.

This exhibition is a homecoming for the artist, who had a residency here in 2005. It was the venue’s splendid ceramic mural, Lucio Fontana’s Il Sole (The Sun), 1952, that inspired Karstiess to turn to clay. His totemic and symmetrical Isenheim-Rochen-Wesen (Fetisch) (Isenheim-Skate-Being [Fetish]), 2015, held up on a metal rod, feels like a stack of molten vertebrae. Stellar, 2016, is made up of casts from Neolithic and Bronze Age cup and ring marks found in the Northumberland countryside. This piece confronts visitors in the foundation’s passageway with its roiling animism, and it contrasts starkly with the Zen calm of the Álvaro Siza and Rudolf Finsterwalder–designed building. Karstiess harnesses the primitive world into sophisticated, abstract objects that resound throughout time.