Art Office

The quiet time of corona prompted Anne Wenzel to work on a plan that had been in her head for some time: a study of Francis Bacon, into how to translate his paintings into three-dimensional ceramic images. At first she emphasized the human figure and noticed that Bacon's seemingly abstract flesh masses, human figures, which at first seem like mere brushstrokes, are nevertheless anatomically accurate. It also fascinated her because of the balance between abstraction and figuration, which she is constantly working on. Moreover, she added more and more architectural, spatial elements in her work. “Although Bacon painted, of course, I see his work mainly as three-dimensional installations. Human figures, masses of flesh twisted together in abstracted spaces. How do they relate to each other? How do they come together in a logical way? Where is the limit?” She would look for the answers in glazes, composition, in the relationship between mass and emptiness. This is to “develop a formal language as a basis for future new, monumental autonomous installations.”

Wenzel has received several prizes for her oeuvre, which is represented in museum collections such as Boijmans Van Beuningen, the SMAK in Ghent, the Princessehof in Leeuwarden. Her often monumental sculptures can be found in the public space of Den Bosch, Barendrecht, Maastricht, as a fountain at the Zwolle District Court, and she designs the Razzia Monument in Rotterdam. The R&D committee found the tension of the architectural space an interesting research area in this beautiful proposal with its special visual references and that the artist could undoubtedly provide many insights.

In the end, Wenzel went on to make twelve ceramic statues in twelve months. It felt to her like a daring project because of its ambiguity: are they copies or autonomous images? “Every painting that I chose as a starting point had to have something that I didn't know yet, how I could translate it into 3D in the first place. After all, you only learn something if you start taking new steps, pushing boundaries.” In it she learned new colours, materials and shapes, even new ways of solving problems. Ultimately, the most important results of the research are not these small images but the new thoughts that have arisen from them. She has compiled these in a publication, with texts by Sacha Bronwasser and Richard Leydier, and presented them with the images at Galerie Akinci in Amsterdam. The book is for sale at TENT.