Spaces of Harmony

Klemens Pasoldt's sculptures are complex, irregular and unusual. They are difficult to describe verbally and almost impossible to calculate mathematically because they defy all conventional patterns, moving between familiar basic forms, combining them, breaking them up, revealing new spaces and describing new surfaces. They are rich in form, diverse, convoluted and twisted, smooth, angular, harmonious and disrupted, and thus a mirror of the reality of our lives. For although we like to describe the world in terms of striking contrasts, speaking of friend and foe, love and hate, home and away, reality always moves between these poles. Pasoldt skilfully plays with intersections and overlaps, creating empty spaces and allowing his sculptures to expand in all dimensions, so that no clear orientation can be discerned. There is no front or back, no left or right; each perspective offers a new insight with its own validity.

The artist, who lives in the Swiss town of Winterthur, first studied geology in the 1980s before going on to study colour, form and space at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in St. Gallen ten years later. Since 1999 he has worked as a freelance artist and designer, specialising in printmaking as well as sculpture. His perception of a world marked by the conflict of opposites determines his artistic motif: »Nothing is only good, nothing only evil; what seems right today may be wrong tomorrow; with every decision we find ourselves in the grey area between the extremes.« In his work, he searches for the links between the poles, the reconciliation of seeming contradictions that are mutually dependent: »The aim of design is always to reconcile extremes, at a time when a strong insistence on correctness is celebrated as sophistication.«

More about the artist: Klemens Pasoldt's artist page