carlier | gebauer is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Asta Gröting. Not feeling too cheerful: reclining figures, facades and more will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. 

In Asta Gröting’s manifold artistic practices, which she has developed since the mid-1980s, the artist translates sculptural thought in diverse media. Gröting inverts the lexicon of monumental sculpture to draw our attention to absence and the physical and emotional rifts between people and things. Whether addressing family members, friends, lovers, or historical figures, Gröting’s work across media seeks to cast abstract qualities such as thought, intimacy, mourning, conflict, and subjectivity. Her ongoing engagement with gaps, interior spaces, and inner organs questions the social body by taking something away from it and, in the words of writer Deborah Levy, “allows this absence to do the talking.”

Gröting’s current exhibition with carlier | gebauer addresses questions of vulnerability, injury, and repression through three new work cycles, as well as selected earlier works. The works in the exhibition evince an expanded understanding of the body, which brings to mind Michel Serres’ notion of the “mingled body.” According to Serres, the body is “a world” an open, mixed entity that comes into being through contact with other bodies, whether human bodies, social bodies, or metaphorical bodies. In Gröting’s works, we see a fascination with the invisible worlds that lie beneath a surface or in the quiet abyss that might reside
between two bodies or things.