I encountered the work of Susanne Thiemann for the first time in a group exhibition of Munich artists at the "Haus der Kunst". Her work fascinated me because Thiemann works on the thin line between the applied arts -handicraft- and sculpture. At the same time she does not shy away from heavy loaded themes such as femininity or domestication, but she does so in a highly personal way. It struck me that I find echos in her work of leading feminist artists such as Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark or even Yayoi Kusama. A deep interest in the viewer's reaction and participation is what Thiemann is after as well. Thiemann strive for a renewal of what it means "to have" a craft and at the same time "to deviate" from it.
Chris Dercon
Eröffnung Freitag, 9. September 2022, 18 - 21 Uhr. Die Künstlerin ist anwesend.
Colours in Motion! Der Titel ist Programm. Die Ausstellung ist farbintenisv, vibrierend, erfrischend, haptisch, betörend, funkig und ein wenig ausladend. So soll es sein – das braucht der Herbst.
Mit Susanne Thiemann stellen wir eine besondere Künstlerin vor. Nach ihrer abgeschlossenen Meisterprüfung als Korbflechterin eröffnete sie vor 35 Jahren ihre eigene Werkstatt, die schon nach wenigen Jahren zum Atelier für ihre ersten Skulpturen und Objekte wurde. Und damals wie heute haben allesamt eins gemeinsam: Sie sind geflochten.
Das Material war und ist nach wie vor Recyclingware. Durch Zufall entdeckte Susanne Thiemann einen großen Bestand von bunten Kunststoffschläuchen, die in den 1960ern und 1970ern für die Produktion von damals hard-edge, modernen Stühlen und Liegen verwendet wurden. Die leichte Formbarkeit und Schmiegsamkeit der Schläuche war ideal für die Flechtarbeit und die Farbigkeit faszinierte sie: warmes Ocker, Himmelblau, Pink, strahlendes Gelb und sattes Kirschrot.
Dieses faszinierende Zusammenspiel von industriellen Materialien und traditionellen Handwerkstechniken ist ein Charakteristikum, das sich bis heute wie ein roter Faden durch das künstlerische Schaffen von Susanne Thiemann zieht.
Ihre frühen Skulpturen sind wiegende, wogende Geschöpfe, die genüsslich in die Höhe wachsen und mit all ihren weichen Kurven ungemein sinnlich wirken.
Und dann kam New York und aus der Sinnlichkeit wurde Funkiness.
Mit einem Stipendium in der Tasche ging’s über den großen Teich, hinein in das Kunstszentrum schlecht hin.
Als Studentin am ISCP und häufiger Gast im Louis Bourgeois Salon erlebte sie neue Horizonte: Die Experimentierfreude war hier gewaltig, Kunst, wohin das Auge sah… Susanne Thiemann erlebte einen Vibe, der nach neuen Richtungen schrie. Kurz: New York setzte Impulse.
Geschlossene Skulpturen waren gestern. Sie mussten sich öffnen. Ihre Skulpturen wurden immer „offener". Aufgelöst. Überall „fransten" sie aus. Farbiges Plexiglas, Alltagsgegenstände wie Lampenschirme wurden eingearbeitet oder quietschbunte Expandaseile wurden zu verlängerten Armen. Ihre neuen Skulpturen hangen von der Decke, stülpten sich über Stühle, Tische oder Böcke. Viele Skulpuren wurden zu tragbaren „Passtücken", weshalb Chris Dercon Susanne Thiemann den weiblichen Franz West nannte.
Die Arbeiten der „Colours in Motion" Ausstellung führen diese Linie weiter.
Bei all dem blieb sie ihrem Handwerk des Flechtens immer treu. „Persistence“ würde es der New Yorker nennen. Wir nennen es Gradlinigkeit und Konsequenz. Das war nicht immer einfach für Sie, gibt ihr aber heute Recht. Denn „gestern" war die Verschmelzung von Kunst und Kunsthandwerk noch unerhört. „Heute“ ist sie übliche Praxis: Stoffe und Textilen, Sticken und Nähen, Weben und Knüpfen – das alles ist in der zeitgenössischen Kunstlandschaft omnipräsent, als wäre es niemals anders gewesen. Susanne Thiemann war in ihrer Denk- und Arbeitsweise ihrer Zeit voraus und gleichzeitig hat sie etwas vorweggenommen, was nicht aktueller sein könnte: Ihre offenen, in den Raum greifenden Arbeiten stehen thematisch dafür, dass Altes aufgebrochen werden muss, um Neues formen zu können. Das Denken von „Welt" bedarf einer Neuorientierung. Als Individuen müssen wir um-die-Ecke denken, um lebendigere, vitalere Verflechtungen möglich zu machen.
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Opening Friday, September 9, 2022, 6 - 9pm. The artist is present.
Colours in Motion! The title says it all. The exhibition is colourful, vibrant, refreshing, tactile, beguiling, funky and a little exuberant. That's how it should be - that's what autumn needs.
With Susanne Thiemann we present a unique artist. After gaining her master's certificate as a basket maker, she opened her own workshop 35 years ago, which only a few years later became the studio for her first sculptures and objects. And then as well as today, they all have one thing in common: they are woven.
The material was and still is recycled goods. By chance, Susanne Thiemann discovered a large stock of colourful plastic tubes that were used in the 1960s and 1970s for the production of then hard-edge, modern chairs and lounges. The easy plasticity and flexibility of the tubes was ideal for weaving and the colours fascinated her: warm ochre, sky blue, pink, bright yellow and rich cherry red.
This fascinating interplay of industrial materials and traditional craft techniques is a characteristic that runs like a thread through Susanne Thiemann's artistic work to this day.
Her early sculptures are swaying, heaving creatures that grow gleefully upwards and seem immensely sensual with all their soft curves.
And then came New York and sensuality became funkiness.
With a scholarship in her pocket, she crossed the pond to the centre of the art world.
As a student at the ISCP and frequent guest at the Louis Bourgeois Salon, she experienced new horizons: the joy of experimentation was tremendous, art wherever the eye could turn... Susanne Thiemann experienced a vibe that cried out for new directions. In short: New York set impulses.
Closed sculptures were a thing of the past. They had to open up. Her sculptures became more and more "open". They "frayed" everywhere. Coloured plexiglass, everyday objects like lampshades were incorporated or squeaky-coloured expanded ropes became extended arms. Her new sculptures hang from the ceiling, are draped over chairs, tables or trestles. Many of her sculptures became portable "fitted pieces", which is why Chris Dercon called Susanne Thiemann the female Franz West.
The works in the "Colours in Motion" exhibition continue along this line.
Through it all, she always remained true to her craft of weaving. "Persistence" is what the New Yorker would call it. We call it steadfastness and consistency. That was not always easy for her, but today it proves her right. Because "yesterday" the fusion of art and craft was still unheard of. 'Today' it is common practice: fabrics and textiles, embroidery and sewing, weaving and knotting - it is all omnipresent in the contemporary art landscape, as if it had never been any other way.
Susanne Thiemann was ahead of her time in her way of thinking and working, and at the same time she anticipated something that could not be more contemporary: Her open works that extend into space stand for the fact that the old must be broken open in order to be able to form the new. Thinking of the "world" needs a reorientation. As individuals, we have to think around the corner in order to make more dynamic, more vital connections possible.
boutwellschabrowsky.com
Opposites always attract, that is a fact: bright and dark; order and disorder; happy and sad; the beauty and the beast. Everything would be boring without its evil counterpart.
The sculptures of Susanne Thiemann are composed of thin monochrome plastic hoses, coloured electric wires, and thick strips of shredded car tyres.
Pieces of lost property and remaining stocks of mass-produced, hardly decomposing products.
Materials that are triggering many connotations because they belong to our everyday life and use. We like synthetic material because it is so smooth and convenient, even though we often consider it as cheap and of inferior quality. We like soft colours like pink and light blue because they give us the impression of childhood living in an innocent world, although we all know how cruel this sweet world can be.
Susanne Thiemann works with simple materials that are generally available, and she uses one of the oldest crafts in the world – the art of weaving and interlacing.
Thus she joins single cords to shapes ranging from solid braided skin to a loose network of tyres cut into pieces – voracious ribbons, either hanging from the ceiling or lying slack on the floor.
What was once a wheel tyre now causes totally different connotations in Down and Going Down. Bizarre and tragicomic. Simultaneously, they show us how fragile our lives and our society are and how quickly we dispose of things because they are not useful anymore and because we have no room for things that are past their prime.
In works like Group and Big Peddig, the steles‘ pink, light blue, black, or beige braided skin stretches like a stocking over a skeleton made of wire and papier mâché or wood. The steady, harmonic weave of plastic hoses is deformed by dents, constrictions, and excrescences.
We can walk round the sculptures, surround them, thus seeing them from the artist‘s point of view.
By working around and weaving in circles, she has given the sub-constructions a skin of thin lines. The crimpling gives the sculptures mobility and life. Strange and tender creatures made of plastic, stretching up in a desperate and peculiar way or collapsing limply.
Susanne Thiemann works with the rigid and floating, with the self-contained and the tattered. Her sculptures relate to each other and to the room. Sometimes standing in the middle of it, sometimes lying around in a corner as a shimmering, loudly coloured soft machine, or dangling down from the ceiling like stockings. Whether alone or in a group, they always give the impression that opposites attract: affection meets rejection – disorder meets order – lightmeets strong – fake meets reality – cheeriness meets seriousness – beauty meets the beast.
Susanne Robbert
The woven sculptures of Susanne Thiemann, born in 1955, captivate through the manner in which they contrast form and material. The result is an exciting combination of order and chaos, density and dissolution, attraction and rejection. After completing her training as a basket maker in 1987, Thiemann worked primarily in her own master studio in Munich before dedicating herself increasingly in recent years to artistic work.
With old parts of automobile tires and synthetic tubes from which seat profiles of chairs were manufactured in the 1960s and 70s she creates abstract objects which standing, lying or suspended from the ceiling ? redefine space. The basic form is a supporting skeleton made of wire and wood which is covered in a lengthy process with a woven skin. Deformations, bulges and constrictions develop and the pliable material appears to collapse on itself while continuing to retain the original form.
For Thiemann, the appeal of the material lies not only in the smooth structure of the surface and its mouldability, but also in the colorfulness. Bright red, pink, light blue and yellow are the typical colors of the 1960s and 70s which simultaneously attract and repel through associations such as lightness and joie de vivre but also triviality and kitsch. I deal with themes from the seventies like the Hippy era which I myself experienced when I was very young. My sculptures implement my thoughts and feelings about that era in an abstract manner? the colorful and the destructive aspects which were so close together and yet swept many into an abyss.
These are the contrasts which fascinate the artist. The sculptures attest to an artificially created world whose superficial beauty and brightness conceal the destructive aspects of an era in which many people, through excessive use of drugs and free sex, were confronted with existential problems. Personal memories and the lives of people of that time which the artist reconstructs by means of prepared collages form the basis for her abstract sculptures which document the ruptures and adversities in the course of human lives.
Julia Klüser
Trust me, 2022, geflochtene Kunststoffschläuche, 200 x 116 x 27 cm, Foto: Achim Schäfer