Jari Ortwig, 2013
Tamara Lorenz did not develop the minimalistic installation for VITRINEN as a sculptor but actually as a photographer, as an “operator” in front of and behind the camera. When subtle gestures and graphic traces of the artist enter into an interplay with the vitrine structures, when (light) shadows and reflections, space and surface optically interlace – new realities are created.
Originating from one of the vitrine structure’s inscribed logic, which with the arrangement of surfaces in geometric forms (triangles, right angles, trapezoids) makes the inclusion of minimalistic sculptures visible, Lorenz symbolises her own view of the world. She creates temporary beauties via imprecisions, the run of paint and drips and last but not least undermines mathematical strictures and calculabilities and the clarity of forms by dint of curves and roundings as well as a breakup in the shift of dimensions – indeed the uniqueness of the things.
Lorenz’ s interest is in a radical constructivist approach and therein the absolute subjectivity of perception. Perception is never objective. Perception is always construction. This approach led her to formulate the title and geometry “in principle” inherent logic itself ad absurdum ironically flouting the objectivity of the natural sciences.
The artist quite freely uses the roles and expectations of geometry as well as those of an art context. As subject matter of the non-objective painting of the early 20th century, (for instance Suprematism and its intellectual-theoretical underpinnings) geometric forms were bound up in utopian claims of being capable of creating a completely new secular conception of the world. Spirituality and political revolutions were among the solemn guiding principles of geometry-based art. In the 1960s minimalism, based on the most simple, basic geometrical structures striving for objectivity, clarity and logic was posited as the counter-reaction to gestural painting.
Tamara Lorenz avails herself sympathetically of both languages – that of logic and that of pathos not, however, without thwarting the extreme with a combination of lightness, wit and irony and locating herself somewhere between perhaps, the here and now, between truth and reality in order lastly to honour the beauty of the incompleteness of the everyday.
Translation: James Rumball