Martin Assig: Westwerk Havelhaus

OPENING Friday, May 2nd, 7 p.m.

GALERIE VOLKER DIEHL is marking Gallery Weekend Berlin 2008 (2- 4 May 2008) with a new solo exhibition by Martin Assig. Westwerk Havelhaus not only comprises Assig's panel paintings and drawings, but also highlights a series of 24 house and church objects created over the recent months especially for this exhibition. Never before have Assig's plastic works been shown in such number and variety.

The sculptures are created from architectural models, either found or purpose built, and all treated with a coating of coloured wax, using the encaustic technique so characteristic of Assig's panel paintings. According to Eugen Blume, Director of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, writing in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, these works resemble "soul houses". They are very strange, sometimes absurd buildings, telling of the present-day "homelessness of human consciousness“. The model format of the houses, towers, palaces and churches awakens the innocence of the child-like gaze encountering the mysteries of the world in naïve amazement. Martin Assig's auratic house objects touch the viewer on a very deep, almost instinctual level. They alternate between great seriousness and seeming naivety, treating architecture as an image of the human mind both in terms of the power of rational thought and the unfathomable nature of the human psyche.

Martin Assig
Westwerk Havelhaus