Martin Walde

Martin Walde has made creative use of the opportunities provided by a comprehensive retrospective, rethinking and reconstructing works that were previously considered finished. His art—photographs, sculptures, installations, and videos—is never static, but instead functions as a kind of transformer. Walde’s pieces are, in a sense, containers to be filled in by the viewer; only at the moment of reception do they take on their real form. “I am interested in the possibility of leaving the evolution of an object open,” he says. Because of this, they are never merely “on display,” but have a performative character. In NOFF #4 (Nature’s Own Flexible Facsimile), 2001, this can be understood quite literally: Visitors encounter an incredibly long piece of green tape that is at one point sandwiched between two heated irons, and are encouraged to pull the material through the machines, thereby adding to the tangle of warped green material lying like moss on the floor. Walde leads us into an action of obsessive creation, ceding responsibility for the sculpture’s size and layout. In other works, such as The Thin Red Line (2003), 2005, Walde literalizes the idea of the gift. For this work, a young woman hired to walk outside of the gallery while coiling red wool quietly asks passersby to give her a small personal item. She then integrates what she is given into her knitted “sculpture” and moves on. This innocuous act, like many of Walde’s works, confuses private and public spheres and creates a “collective fetish” (in the artist’s terminology) from obsession and ritual.

Translated from the German by Jane Brodie.