Raphael Weilguni & Viola Relle: bring me back to earth

For the first time ever, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle is showing abstract works by Viola Relle and Raphael Weilguni, alumni of the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, in a solo exhibition. The artist duo’s sculptures organically interweave and dynamically repel each other. In this constellation, the materials—ceramics and porcelain—appear like authentically movable elements seemingly leading lives of their own. Abstract forms entirely free of associations are created. A sculpture without beginning or end, a structure in which the associative eye of the beholder seeks a point of reference and seems to discover the familiar only to lose itself once again in the fray of complete abstraction. The sculptures reveal an interplay of the beholder’s searching eye and the twisted object.

The works create tension — one which has built up in the artist couple’s collaboration. Control and equanimity, a constant give and take, a symphony of a relationship between two people transferred to their sculptures, thus creating new emotions — or do the sculptures march to the beat of their own drum, like living elements?

 The lines are blurred, and with each sculpture the artists pose the same question: How far can one go once the line of controllability is crossed and at what point does the construct collapse? They use porcelain and ceramics, combining materials in a detailed composition and by adding wax and plaster the artists give the works their final form. Durch das Weiterarbeiten mit Wachs und Gips geben sie den Arbeiten ihre finale Form.

bring me back to earth is a title these sculptures might have given themselves — as an autonomous living organism. Free from worldly gravitation, the sculptures develop a new language of art. And if the visitor reads this language attentively enough, a world of detailed interconnections in interpersonal bonds and relationships between nature and industry opens up.

Relle and Weilguni studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich—Weilguni in the class of Jean-Marc Bustamante, Florian Pumhösl. Relle under Norbert Prangenberg, Kerstin Brätsch and Nicole Wermers. In 2019, they participated in the Thirteenth Fellbach Triennial of Small-scale Sculpture and won the Bavarian Art Studio Support Program Award for visual artists.