Ayşe ErkmenEINS ZWEI DREI

Ayşe Erkmen receives the Ernst Franz Vogelmann-Preis 2020! Ayşe Erkmen did not step onto the world stage of art unexpectedly, but she did so with actions full of conceptual force. Trained in Istanbul as a classical sculptor in the early 1970s and living today both there and in Berlin, the artist caused an international sensation with, for example, her helicopter flight around Münster Cathedral as part of the SkulpturProjekte in 1997 – the helicopter had a sculpture damaged in the world war suspended from its hook – or, twenty years later, with “On Water,” likewise created for the SkulpturProjekte, in which visitors were permitted to walk on water in the Münster harbour basin. The opposition between Occident and Orient, however, holds hardly any artistic relevance for her, since what she seeks is “what the place and the situation demand of (her).” In her actions, installations and interventions Erkmen’s attention is therefore directed at the specific characteristics of the particular site. Her gaze falls on the incidental, the overlooked, on that which conceals complexity when history and function are superimposed. In July 2020 Ayşe Erkmen now receives the 5th Ernst Franz Vogelmann-Prize for Sculpture, which has been awarded in Heilbronn every three years since 2008 – she is the first woman in the line of previous prizewinners, which includes Roman Signer, Franz Erhard Walther, Thomas Schütte and Richard Deacon. Her works, conceived for a limited period, disappear when the exhibitions come to an end; the permanent and the firmly fixed have always struck her as suspect. Ayşe Erkmen’s work is accordingly not aimed at the enduring work of art; rather, with minimal interventions on site it produces a temporary condition that challenges perception and remains as memory. Over five decades there has thus emerged an oeuvre always founded on the sculptural and marked by acuity of thought, sensuousness and formal rigour, in which a diversity of concepts, forms, media and materials intersect on the most varied levels. The book provides a brilliant survey of this genesis of the work, to which the extremely instructive text by the curator Rita Täuber supplies an additional key.

Exhibition:
Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Kunsthalle Vogelmann, 18/7 – 1/11/2020