Christiane Löhr, CINQUE ELEVAZIONI

Room 19

What kind of feeling do I have when I find myself in a Gothic cathedral where everything points to verticality?
In sacred buildings there is often a recognisable relationship between botanical structures, rules of construction that work on both a large and small scale.
The material realisation speaks to me of spiritual intentions, and in the case of churches and temples it speaks to me of the faith of those who built them. Something similar can be seen in works of art.
Christiane Löhr

Simplicity and the essence of things.Light and fragile, Christiane Löhr’s work resolves the complexity and abundance of the elements of which it is composed with “delicacy”. The great constructive laboriousness, the number of micro-elements used, the geometric and compositional richness of the forms, find expression in a surprising and precious simplicity, which manifests itself through delicacy, fragility and lightness. The essence of Christiane Löhr’s work can be grasped by observing, down to the most microscopic detail, the complexity that generates it, and of which she succeeds in achieving an aesthetic synthesis admirable in beauty and yet incredibly light, almost evanescent, in perception. The expressive power of these works lies precisely in their capacity to surprise, to leave us breathless, in a form of obsequious enchantment and respect for the impalpable fragility of which they are made up.
Thistle seeds, dandelions, grass stalks and horsehair are the elements used to compose veritable micro-architectures, sustained by rigour and geometric precision, where nothing is superfluous and everything is subject to rules that seem to draw directly from Nature, even if Nature is merely a starting point from which to build unexpected compositions somewhere between the botanical and the architectural. […]
Christiane Löhr captures Nature’s ephemeral sense and the transience of its elements, challenging its physical laws by assembling seeds into unusual shapes, and its temporal laws by fixing those same elements in immobile and lasting structures. […] At this point, the search becomes evident: simplicity becomes the instrument of investigation to identify something that lies far beyond appearance, that uses fragility to make the ear and the senses subtend a latent message, barely whispered, of the search for the essence of things, of an intrinsic Nature that hides behind the complex and articulated form, that orders beauty and regulates the world.
“Perhaps I am searching for what holds the world together” says the artist: delicacy is a condition, a state of feeling, and simplicity a goal, which is achieved, as Constantin Brancusi taught, “in spite of oneself, by getting closer to the real meaning of things”.
Valentina Muscedra

Christiane Löhr was born in Wiesbaden (Germany) in 1965. She lives and works between Cologne and Prato.