Freud told us that civic monuments and memorials are made to preserve the memory of a traumatic event (war, the loss of human life) and invite us to remember the painful experiences of the past. Gröting continues this conversation by sculpting monuments that preserve the memory of the present, or which ask questions of the present, while inviting us to speculate on a timeless absence- something or someone lost, missing, gone.

Space Between a Family was conceived when Gröting’s mother was fatally ill. It is an attempt to mourn in the present tense for a human subject, who, unlike the gentlemen in Bodenplatte 2, has not yet departed. If it is a celebration and conservation of life, it is also an unsentimental gaze at family relations – the empty but haunted space of all that is unspoken between them. Gröting subverts the visual language we associate with most public monuments, always alert to the difficult task of casting abstract qualities such as thought, dignity, conflict, subjectivity. It is not hard to imagine that these introspective figures possess internal organs, (lungs, hearts, kidneys) but they are uncanny too, mournful grey ghosts of substance who seem to be emerging from both a war and a womb.