Exhibitions / One of Many / Selected writings

SELECTED WRITINGS
PAWEL ALTHAMER

You should be surprised by your own reality: it’s exotic, sometimes.

On Earth I feel like a newcomer, someone who’s here only for the time being. And this feeling is with me all the time, despite the whole stabilisation that I’ve worked out. There is a memory in me of some other, unknown place. I’m only passing through here, paying a short visit, and I don’t know where my voyage will take me. But I feel that I have a mission, that I found myself here after all, I’ve to fulfil my obligations.

Artists are people without place. I’m one of them: I don’t really know where my place is. I know, of course, that what I’m saying fits into a pattern. Like the homeless. I believe that there’s an element of order in what can pass for chaos.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been imprisoned, and if you are in a prison you can use some possibilities to escape, such as researching other planets other spaces.

I’ve decided to make different things, maybe even strange things, irrational things because I need to keep a feeling that the world is full of irrational things.

I build a man sculpture, the figure of Pawel Althamer, who is the focal point of my interests. It is a desire to record the physical presence of myself, my confrontation with my work. Does being next to a dead-man object make me experience my own animation more strongly?

It is a major achievement to realise that the body is only a vehicle for the soul. I feel like a cosmonaut in the suit of my own body, I am a trapped soul. The body plays a role of a dress, of an address. My bodily address is Pawel Althamer.

A self-portrait is my interpretation of myself and of my life because even now, if I observe it, I feel this is not mine, it’s something that doesn’t belong to me. I participated in the process, but it’s not only mine, and this is the thing which always fascinated me, to work in the process which is a kind of mystery, always.

I feel such a distance from myself and the sculptures are a kind of sign, and I use mixed techniques because I feel I’m very mixed, mentally mixed, and by education I’m mixed.

SELECTED WRITINGS

Each work by Pawel Althamer, as the artist underlines, are variations on the common theme of “Althamer”. While televisions broadcast reality shows, Pawel Althamer addresses the audience to confront with a non filtered reality. Pawel Althamer’s work suggests that the distinction between natural reality and artificial reality is completely fictional.
Adam Szymczyk

Althamer shares with Beuys a religious attitude towards his own role, as an artist, in the transformation of society. The way he looks at reality is intimate, personal, and psychological. For him, the way to change the world is by addressing our immediate surroundings. In an almost Franciscan way, Althamer forces the viewer to look into herself or himself, asserting the position that art’s first context is within ourselves – our soul and mind, not yet corrupted by the speed of contemporary reality. What we see is what we want to see. We are all actors, Althamer seems to say and it is up to us to figure out how we want to change the world through our daily performance called life.
Francesco Bonami

By means of discreet interventions into everyday life, the organization of playful and often absurd collective engagements or even acts of direct political negotiation, Pawel Althamer directs social scenarios that evolve from, and seek to shed light on, aspects of his own personal experience. Althamer’s poignant and incisive critique emerges from the apparently seamless insertion of staged artifice into quotidian social situations.
Andrew Bonacina

The strange and beautiful tension of Pawel Althamer’s work between the invisible and the absolutely, solidly real is unique in contemporary art discourse, although it has been the desiderata of many artists since the end of the Second World War. This is why although Althamer’s work relates to that of many artists old and young, it stands slightly, awkwardly, apart.
Laura Hoptman

All of Pawel Althamer’s work seem to be a constantly repeated attempt at creating a self-portrait. From hyper-realistic figural representations, to a wooden bench placed in a sculpture park in Sonsbeek, the artist keeps sculpting himself. At the same time all the objects he creates and all actions he performs are but an attempt to go beyond the material image, to find the true spiritual ‘I’.
Joanna Mytkowska

For Pawel Althamer the point is to create a backdrop upon which the events of life will be inscribed and exhibited.
Hans Ulrich Obrist

Pawel Althamer sends the world through a time machine, blurring presentation and representation, no giveaway, no prop-ism, no as-if: in the end we’re all going to be finished, heaven or not.
Andreas Schlaegel