Interesting that our conversation begins with the question of a framing device. I suppose this would quite rightly suggest that I am, on occasion, preoccupied with establishing a dramaturgy for the exhibitions I mount. In recent years I’ve employed the dado rail as a kind of formal organising principle and, perhaps more importantly, as a vernacular that situates the work within a complex continuum of class and taste. In that sense, the dado rail is one of several motifs (corkscrews, buttons, musical instruments) that have come to play an important role in my sculptural language. What these objects have in common beyond their domestic connotations is the way in which they implicate themselves in the accordion folds of time. I would quite happily suggest there is an inherent conservatism implicit in many of the forms and images that I am drawn to. In the sculptures and exhibitions as a whole, there is a certain timbre I’m working towards, and this tone is situated somewhere in an uncanny valley between decorum and perversion. In ‘Nausea’ Jean-Paul Sartre describes an unsavoury male figure at the centre of a problem picture. There is a sense of depravity, of moral corruption, of implicated evil, but it is only in potentia. The man is described as ‘shaping thoughts of crab.’ I’ve never been able to shake this line and now I try to carry this feeling into each new work I make.
I’ve never been asked about the way I work with colour before. Questions about colour seem most often reserved for painters. I make sculpture yes, but I have a feeling I’m really working more like a painter. My time in the studio is spent slouching towards places the work has not yet been. This is not a linear movement, and certainly has nothing to do with progress, but rather a series of digressions and wrong turns that sometimes lead somewhere novel and productive. If we think about the unresolved sculpture as a kind of Sphinx offering forth riddles, the only way to solve said riddles, and in doing so resolve the sculpture, is through intuition. Painters are often much more open about how important a role intuition plays in the process of making than sculptors I think. The Liste presentation is essentially a suite of wooden panels, treated in oil paint. In that sense it is a very conservative gesture. They are the closest I have come to making paintings and this is very exciting for me. Perhaps any question of colour palette is best answered by the list of specific materials that are collaged into these painted shallow reliefs; antique ivory, ebony, assorted animal bones, precious metals and cast plaster.
I’d prefer not to detail my relationship with how I source the antique ivory but I’ve been working with this contentious material for almost a decade now; an ethical conundrum that I continue to grapple with. As an artist in my early twenties I embraced a baroque approach to material, and so, there was a time when I would attempt to almost bloat the sculptures with materiality. In recent years though, the lexicon has been simplified, and the sculptures are all the more powerful for it. Now, materials such as the bones of German animals, trees felled by beavers and motifs quoted from specific local histories help to embed the work within the physical landscape and the tradition of Germanic cultural production, something that even as I write it, conjures up crab-shaped thoughts.
Yes absolutely, changing of the seasons, but also changes in taste, shifts in power and the multitude of ways in which history repeats itself; a cultural reflux. I have no interest in the exhibitions containing any real sense of narrative, but I do think a lot about how narratives are built. After reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings; a Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate, I became particularly interested in how I could translate a literary device such as ring composition into object making. This is not to say I am equating narrative circularity with an actual circle of course, but instead drawing an exciting formal connection in how I work in the studio, a woodturner works on a lathe, and the way in which a story is shaped. A wood turner is quite literally applying more pressure as he moves towards the centre of the form, and the same too can be said for how long form prose is shaped. While I have worked with a great variety of craftspeople and artisans over the last decade, a Brandenburg-based Drechselmeister (Master Woodturner) has come to play an unusually important role in my practice. When he turns in a new piece for me, I am interested not only in the object he is making, but in the act of him making it; the transformative performance – like Blake’s ‘Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop’ – the historical gesture. At the same time, I’m suspicious of work that indulges in Sentimentalism and I’m deeply troubled by attitudes that conflate handwerk and craftsmanship with any notion of honesty or truth. This is perhaps where my use of trompe l’oeil stems from too. In regards to the button as a metaphor – it’s really the opposite. I have been searching for a form that is able to exist without metaphor… at the very least, a form whose throat is so full with association that it has no more room for imposed metaphorical flourishes. The button, or Knopf in German, is at once sophisticated and dumb, ubiquitous and highly specific, symbolic and precious, and cheap and disposable. The button is a little like the holy fool, a sort of witness to everything.
I wouldn’t say that the artists involved in the exhibition have influenced me so much as that the exhibition proposed a confluence of my artistic concerns and the people and things that concern me on a daily basis. Even the title of the show, ‘Practical Life’ (a term borrowed from Maria Montessori), was a juncture between my preoccupations as an artist and my responsibilities as a son, parent and family member. I suppose I was really trying to trouble the legibility of objects within a group exhibition format. So the exhibition at Robert Heald brought together works from artists with whom I am in conversation (including my wife and mother-in-law), antiques from my personal collection and household ephemera (chewed dog bones and used soaps collected from German families). In regards to my own work, I have never been interested in developing a unique sculptural language but rather a kind of patois. Often, I’m building work out of images or objects that already hold meaning in the world, say a corkscrew or broom. I’m trying to exert just enough pressure on these recognisable forms that an abstraction occurs. Collaborating with craftspeople (willow weavers, glass blowers, wood carvers, etc.) has always helped to ground the work in traditional vernaculars from which I can then deviate.
I’m pleased you address the tendency towards deception in the work. There are several motivating factors here and are largely to do with the communion between object and viewer. I’m really trying to protract the act of engagement for as long as possible and a level of material or visual manipulation is part of this. I’m trying to create a scenario where trust is broken and rebuilt several times within the act of looking and I often employ trompe l’oeil as the most immediate signifier of this kind of instability. It’s somewhat similar to the use of an untrustworthy narrator in cinema.
Oscar Enberg (b. 1988, Christchurch, New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin. In 2016-17 he was the Creative New Zealand Artist in Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and in 2017 a recipient of the prestigious Ars Viva Preis, awarded annually to artists living in Germany under the age of 35. His work has been featured in exhibitions at: Halle für Kunst Steiermark (Graz), S.M.A.K, (Ghent), Mackintosh Lane (London), Kunstverein München (Munich), Auckland Art Gallery (Auckland), Centre Pompidou (Paris). Recent exhibitions include: Whistling Minor (duo w. Daniel Sinsel), Peles Empire, Berlin (upcoming), German Fingering, Robert Heald Gallery, Auckland (2024), Schiller’s Skull; mysterious vessel, Brunette Coleman, London (2023), Father Time In My Adam’s Apple, Mackintosh Lane, London (2022).
