ISABELL STERNER
work
text
info

CARRIER BAG (BARSWOGK)  
2025
140 x 134 x 43 cm
Aluminium, steel, ceramics, silicone, wax


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             












Laudatory speech from art historian and curator Nina Schwarzenberger for 
“in good hands only”, Werkgalerie Dresden, 2025

Isabell Sterner's objects play with biomorphic associations and contrasts: hard and soft, smooth and rough, slippery wet and dry dull. She often uses materials such as silicone, wax, and concrete, which are transformed into seemingly prop-like structures through various casting and molding processes. Her works convey a physicality, yet appear frozen in their states. With their protruding points, cracks, and hairs, they seem to refer to something that has already happened. As if cast in wax or similar to a still, they lie before us as remnants of their former selves, or are they only manifested through this? What we see now is the sum of their histories: fragile, vulnerable, and courageous.
For some time now, and now also on display in this exhibition, she has been working with aluminum. While in past objects we find the material as spikes or oversized rivets, defensively encircling the supposed object like armor, here in “Wummerchen” we see the metal as the main protagonist. This change in material gives Isabell Sterner's sculptures a new interpretation. 

The supposed anthropomorphism, the feeling that something alive inhabits the sculpture, gives way to objectivity, and yet we do not have to say goodbye to the object's liveliness. Quite the contrary: the things, as they lie before us or lean against the wall, still seem strangely animated. One could perhaps compare it to Tsukumogami—the Japanese folk belief that objects also have a soul. And yet: the thing, as Sterner calls it, is not a being. But it incorporates essential associations that evoke empathy in us as viewers. And so “Wummerchen” stands in this world on wobbly legs. And I can well imagine how Sterner created this thing with maternal concern, hoping that it would ultimately stand before her in a satisfactory manner. I feel the same way when I look at it with its edges and protrusions: the lower part hangs freely from thin silicone loops on its upper half. It digs into the wall, searching for a makeshift hold. You almost want to hug it. There is a strange ambivalence between the artist and her works, between the material and its effect. 

Sterner's working method can be described as controlled letting go. Following a rough plan, she follows the decisions and paths of her fingers—process-oriented and mindful of chance. She does not need a strict agenda, but rather observes how her objects develop in the moment. She allows the material space in the process of letting go and her own ideas. It resembles a dance between distance and closeness. Perhaps it is also a preparation for the moment of finalization and the ongoing question of when a work of art is finished. And yet Isabell's creations are so close and immediate to her. If we look at the Polaroid series “Coming Home for Christmas,” she is accompanied by this alien-like object on her Christmas vacation, back home to her family. Somehow comparable to that lump in your throat that you often have before long stays with your family. Maybe that's what they are: little balls, cast in aluminum, wax, and ceramic; we can't do without them, but we don't always want them either.
But they have their place, and that's good.