Wolf von Waldow – Metal Sculptures

Wolf Jahn: Excerpt from the Opening Speech on the Occasion of the Exhibition with Mareille Stahncke, Kunstkreis Schenefeld, 2007

For Wolf von Waldow, execution is merely the realization of a carefully devised plan conceived beforehand. This often painstaking and time-consuming craft bears little relation to the creative process itself. Here again, the driving force of sympathy becomes evident. First, there is the artist’s art-historical sympathy – his delight in the Baroque, and in the exquisitely crafted microcosms presented to us in historical goldsmithing. Each plate, each jug, each jewelry box is a world in miniature. Such old goldsmithing has little to do with the pared-down, functional objects of our modern everyday life. Its aim is to show the grand in the small, to condense an entire pantheon into seductive ornamentation through the art of perfect execution.

Then there are those clusters of ornamentation, as produced in the 18th century and other periods, which fascinate von Waldow. These are not simple ornaments of flowers, leaves, or geometric forms, but entire arrangements composed of highly symbolic and sometimes political individual motifs: weapons and flags, garlands and animals. Such often representational decoration is more than mere ornament – it enriches its surroundings with beauty, but almost becomes an independent image with a narrative character, sometimes even claiming a sense of authority.

Wolf von Waldow’s preference for this art-historical richness and narrative expressiveness is unmistakable in his sculptures. They, too, abound in detail, associative motifs, and dense interconnections between elements. Yet the artist departs from his historical models when he begins to transpose his interest in ornamental storytelling into the present. Whatever he combines or relates in his sculptures rarely involves old motifs that have survived their era. We discover a mobile phone, the Deutsche Bank logo, contemporary hairstyles, or a DJ. Alongside these are timeless symbols – the Star of David, the crescent moon, the Christian cross, or the star of communism – rotating together like a kind of windmill around the same axis.

At the same time, von Waldow incorporates popular motifs and reinterprets them. For example, he transforms the figure of Kasper the puppet or the sailor’s anchor – its two side axes turned into hands with pointing fingers – or the German oak leaf, which sprouts from antennas with human ears. Most striking, however, is his sense for sequencing, seriality, and repetition, transforming many of his works into fragments, excerpts from an almost endless cosmos constructed from repeating building blocks.

Von Waldow’s objects sometimes take on the qualities of a puzzle. This is literal when a single large puzzle piece appears in the composition or when the entire work assembles like a completed puzzle from interlocking elements. Conceptually, his works are also created like puzzles, but with the distinction that they embody a kind of self-generating puzzle. It begins with a single motif, whose mere existence generates a second, which produces a third, and so on. Such a puzzle resembles an associative chain realized in three dimensions, transformed by von Waldow into a sculptural image. One might even call this process a form of “sympathetic evolution”: one element produces another, and they merge into a new one.

Once complete, the work radiates the seductive brilliance of a precious object. But caution! Von Waldow’s objects lure the viewer into worlds that are not always benign; rather, with humor and subtle irony, they dismantle our world with gently mischievous – never aggressive – charm, only to present it again as a complex, intricately arranged whole on a tray.

© Wolf Jahn, 2007