Susanne Piotter: Currently under construction

The unfinished and the occasional madness of architectural language find a home in Susanne Piotter’s sculptures and prints. The Berlin artist, with a background in graphic and media design and a degree in stage design from the Maastricht Art Academy, creates exciting objects and imagery steeped in references to architecture.

Her small-format concrete sculptures from the “Artefacts” series consist of individually cast parts, mostly two or three elements, which the artist combines together following the principle of trial and error. Piotter designs her objects by making molds from different materials. She pours these negative forms with the material concrete, and the result is then the positive form. She then discovers spatial solutions by trying out possible combinations of positive forms. She is guided by her fascination for brutalist buildings and the unfinished. By combining solid parts and filigree transitions, she sometimes creates an impression of flawedness in her objects, which resemble building site ruins; they were never finished and now they are. Many of the sculptures can be set up in at least two different ways, providing multiple perspectives on the object, made possible by the object itself. The partial colour design of the sculptures plays with the visible and the invisible, and illustrates the multi-dimensionality of the work.

“Repetitive Structures” - the three-dimensional wall pieces in the series are also made from concrete. In the designs, Piotter combines such diverse influences as the infinite patterns of Islamic ornamentation, textile designs from the Bauhaus, or the systematics of urban forms such as motorway junctions or urban pathways. The works show an interplay of different disciplines, a multidisciplinary creativity in which everything is related to everything. The soft design language is combined with the hard material, design and textile art of architecture; the ephemeral with the permanent.

The prints in the “Lines & Planes” series show rhythmically structured lines and surfaces that are reminiscent of structured facades. The screen prints on velour paper exert a haptic stimulus, which reinforces the impression of surface quality and structured facades. The exhibition shows works that have all emerged from a playful and yet thoroughly methodical approach to finding forms.