Oliver van den BergWerke / Works

“The thesis Oliver van den Berg starts out from is that the products made by human beings can tell us a good deal about their nature; he became known for his objects modelled on technical apparatus such as radar, flight recorders or star projectors,” writes Hilke Wagner. The result is consummately formed sculptures with a futuristic, technoid air, reduced to their perfect surfaces, stripped of their function and traced back to their prototypical appearance. Oliver van den Berg mostly makes them from wood, the sculptor’s material par excellence. In confronting this material with the function of the high-gloss technical models, he reduces the utopias of progress to absurdity while at the same time raising the question of original and image. “With this artistic appropriation, this reduction to aesthetic quality, the possibility of a disinterested reflection opens up, for every technical invention is at the same time a projection of human dreams and inadequacies. In this sense his work is to be located within the cultural-historical tradition of man-machine analogies.” The survey of works since 1990 presented in this volume is arranged by the artist himself into categories such as dummy, documentation, duplication, memory, narrative, model, imitation, parody, replica, deception, translation, experiment, further development, repetition and quotation. His motto: “You do what you do.”