Oliver van den Berg: Werke / Works

"The only work criterion is the price"

"The initial thesis of Oliver van den Berg, who became known for his objects based on technical devices such as radar, flight recorders or star projectors, is that we can learn a lot about people's nature from their products," writes Hilke Wagner. The result is perfectly formed sculptures with a futuristic, technoid appearance that are reduced to their perfect surface, stripped of their function and reduced to their prototypical appearance. Oliver van den Berg mostly creates them from wood, the sculpting material par excellence. By confronting this material with the function of high-gloss technical models, he takes utopias of progress ad absurdum and at the same time poses the question of original and copy. "This artistic appropriation, the reduction to aesthetic quality, opens up the possibility of disinterested reflection, because every technical invention is at the same time a projection of human dreams and inadequacies. In this sense, his work can be located in the cultural-historical tradition of human-machine analogies." The overview of works since 1990 presented in this volume is organised by the artist himself into categories such as dummy, documentation, duplication, memory, narrative, model, imitation, parody, replica, deception, translation, attempt, further development, repetition and quotation. His motto: "You make what you make."