Andreas Golinski / Excavation Dust

Andreas Golinski / Excavation Dust

‘Excavation Dust’ is the second exhibition of works by German artist Andreas Golinski (b. 1979) at the Hezi Cohen Gallery. In the newly created work he consistently condenses his reflections on the presence of the past in the future.

Golinski often uses repetitive hybridisations between architecture and sculpture, which initially appear as references to minimalism due to their reduced form language. However, their meaning does not remain limited to their arrangement in the space, their mere form or pure materiality. Although the use of industrial materials such as concrete and steel in his works is of crucial relevance, it also aims at achieving an impersonal cold, sometimes martial effect showing the rough aesthetic of the decay.
Golinski’s sculptural ensembles are architectural and always created site-specific. This does not only refer to the exhibition space. The artist is primarily interested in the past and the often disturbing stories affiliated with it. Historic drillings and archival research provide him with the substrates of his works. Transferring the past into the presence of an object or an installation does not take place narratively or visually; Golinski’s works rather refer to what no longer or only fragmentarily exists. An (often oppressive) atmosphere is generated by the materiality and the arrangement of the individual elements, which makes the past incidents retraceable for the viewer. They are means of visualising events that have in fact disappeared from our collective memory but nevertheless are not undone and therefore still present.

In ‘Excavation Dust’ Andreas Golinski purposefully causes irritation: on the floor and on the walls of the gallery space real and reproduced doors are installed, some closed, others slightly open. A sculpture, which can be comprehended as a sharp corner of a room and at the same time as the outer edge of a building, is combined with a casing in which a miniature trapdoor is located. In addition there are sculptural abbreviations of ruin-like architectures, with rusty reinforced steel towering from them.

With this confusion Golinski undermines the logic of the space and the social function of architecture. As if on a display he combines the phenomenology of the exterior and the interior space as well as different types of perspective with temporality – a technique that Giovanni Battista Piranesi initiated in the 18th century with his nightmarish “Carceri”.

The motif of the door as a symbol of transcendence from one sphere to another has a long iconographic tradition. Where the doors in ‘Excavation Dust’ lead – maybe into a dark past, into the bottomless void or into an uncertain future – remains vague and is up to imagination. This vagueness becomes evident in the suggestion of the ruinous, the inevitably fragmentary character of the reflection on what once was.

Verena Schneider
From German: Lena Schmidt

Verena Schneider studied Art History at the Universities of Regensburg, Rome and Bonn, specialising in Contemporary Sculpture. She was a part of the inauguration teams at the Max Ernst Museum in Bruehl (2005) and at the Albertinum in Dresden (2010). As a staff member at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Schneider curated a series of seven exhibitions in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden (2012-13), in which master class students were invited to create site-specific multimedia installations. Since 2014, Schneider is a freelance curator based in Dresden.