Kraft der Stille
Susanne Tunn
Anyone who has ever looked into the distance from a mountain peak in the Alps knows the silence of stone. Anyone who has ever watched the waves crashing against the cliffs on a steep coast knows the power of stone. Susanne Tunn condenses this power of silence in her works of stone, some of which are monumental, and allows the stone to tell its own story.
The stone cylinders on the first floor of the museum may resemble column fragments of a gigantic ancient temple or hewn boulders. But they were wrested from the mountain with great mechanical force. They have become objects - each stone in itself with its own personality - that invite us to interact. In the works, geology, archaeology and our individual psychology of perception come together. In recognition of nature, she is concerned with recognizing the essence of the stone and exposing it. While for centuries male-dominated stone sculpture was more about the heroic triumph of the sculptor, about his trial of strength with matter and the overcoming of its resistance ultimately celebrated as the conquest of raw nature, today's understanding of art also embraces the goodness and power of matter itself. Susanne Tunn opens this up to us in her works and thus also an important female cosmos of sculpture and the handling of the object in space.
In this work, too, fragment and wholeness, release and remembrance are combined. This duality is perhaps a guiding principle in the work of Susanne Tunn.
- Dorothée Bauerle-Willert
While the dark blue-gray of Labrador stone from Norway and Krastal marble from Austria predominate on the first floor, Susanne Tunn presents the entire cycle The Great Melancholy for the first time on the upper floor. The bright sculptures of Andalusian Macael marble are lined up as if in a scientific experimental arrangement, in complex geometric shapes reminiscent of the cutting of diamonds. Susanne Tunn created this cycle of works over 30 years, from 1990 to 2022, in the style of Albrecht Dürer's famous Melencolia I.
With the works made of pewter on the upper floor, Tunn brings us back to 2015, when she poured pure, liquid pewter into the joints of the floor in the Dominican Monastery in Osnabrück. The regular grid of the floor joints became a unique form, like a fingerprint, and now curves over the floor as if trying to free itself from the restriction of its own skin. On the upper floor, the delicate and sensitive works on paper provide a glimpse of Susanne Tunn's extensive and independent graphic oeuvre.
While some of her sculptures test the limits of what is possible in weight and mass, similar to Alf Lechner, these works on paper, made with ink and pencil, lead us like miniatures into the mental cosmos of the sculptor. They allow transparency and lightness and let the graphic objects dance weightlessly.
Susanne Tunn was connected with Alf Lechner by an artist friendship that lasted over 30 years. Influenced by a common understanding of the power of nature, the sensitivity of archaic material, of reduction and the balance of mass and space, it was Alf Lechner's express wish to enable her to have a comprehensive exhibition of her work also after the presentation of Perlen aus Stein in 2006. It is therefore a particular pleasure for us to now be able to fulfill this wish.
Art reveals and creates, and it conceals, is order and chaos at the same time. What is beautiful corresponds and contradicts the viewer. It is this tension that Susanne Tunn rigorously maintains.
- Jörg Mertin
