Voice – Calling – Echo – You
Barbara Buchmaier on the duo exhibition Sara Sizer/Bernd Lohaus
Just like being at the docks. Didn’t I just see some heavy wooden planks there like the ones lying on the floor here? Not only that, even the brightly-coloured gilets of the dockers with their backs turned toward me and the stacked containers at the terminal are also flashing before my mind’s eye! Didn’t I just see them before I made my way back into the city along the riverbank to arrive at the gallery?
Welcome to the Sara Sizer/Bernd Lohaus exhibition: duo exhibitions enable two artists and their respective positions to ‘communicate’ with one another, to measure one against the other and explore similarities, convergencies, as well as differences. And this doesn’t just hold for the artists themselves, but also for the visitors. As far as the Sara Sizer/Bernd Lohaus exhibition is concerned, well, it is unique, inasmuch as it was not the gallery owner or a curator who invited the artist Bernd Lohaus (b. 1940, d. 2010) to Sara Sizer’s third solo show at Galerie Sofie Van de Velde, but the American artist (b. 1957, based in Berlin since 2004) herself. Bernd Lohaus was a seminal influence as an artist in Antwerp and far beyond within the context of social sculpture, Fluxus and Arte Povera. From 1966-1976, he also played a prominent role as a gallery owner, in conjunction with his partner, Anny De Decker, in the form of their exhibition space ‘Wide White Space’.
New abstract paintings by Sizer, mainly in medium and portrait format, are juxtaposed here with a selection of sculptures from various phases of Lohaus’s oeuvre.1 These works had previously featured in earlier exhibitions and have now been selected from the Lohaus estate together with Anny De Decker and their daughter, Stella Lohaus. In proposing the exhibition, Sara Sizer, who met Bernd Lohaus twice in person (during a visit in Antwerp and later in Berlin, where he saw and admired one of her early bleach paintings), intuitively opens up an exciting dialogue for us and herself between – in both instances – highly independent and self-determined approaches to sculpture and painting.
What does this encounter say to us?
First, the most obvious, simple thing: in both sets of work we see elementary forms, mostly squares or cubes, which are set in relation to one another: long wooden planks that interlock or are stacked on top of each other, or cardboard boxes treated with dark wax and piled up in the case of Lohaus’s work. In Sizer’s paintings, for example, we see colourful, often luminous rectangles and squares of various sizes that abut one another and coalesce tonally in terms of colour and atmosphere.
A closer look at the artist’s processes reveals a patina of use and/or storage – on the wood, the cardboard, or the fabric, as both Sizer and Lohaus use(d) materials that already have a story to tell. For example, the unworked or barely worked wood in Lohaus’s case, which was once used industrially in the port of Antwerp, refers to international maritime trade and reveals scuff marks and discolouration by dint of its erstwhile deployment. In contrast, Sizer’s velvet fabric, wrinkled from storage, evokes a variety of associations, including notions of femininity, luxury, or even religious habit. Working with references and patina is integral to the practice of both artists, who deliberately do not start ‘from scratch,’ but see their studio as a place of transition in which they integrate what they have found into the artistic process and develop it further using their own means.
Sara Sizer’s paintings, which she makes in an old warehouse near Berlin’s Westhafen, are produced in two stages. In both stages, Sizer consciously engages with the material. First, she treats a piece of uniformly-coloured velvet fabric with bleach, changing its colour in an unpredictable way and, at the same time, precisely recording the existing folds unmistakably into the soft textile surface. In a second step, she applies custom pigments to the rinsed and dried fabric using large brushes made expressly for the purpose. Due to the capillary action enabled by the long-pile structure of the cotton velvet, adjacent colour fields bleed into one another at their edges, depending on the saturation. Sizer describes the creative process as follows: “The blocks in the paintings are pure paint matter on velvet material, the materiality of which is shown through the interaction between the surface and the
1 Bernd Lohaus was also a painter and made many works on paper.
paint.”2 She titled one of her most recent solo exhibitions Second Hand, at once a metaphor for the act of painting, which, in her case, is equally dependent on the characteristics of the material and the artist’s touch.
As a rule, Bernd Lohaus tended to make his sculptures for specific interior or exterior spaces. His chosen material was often detritus – discarded, heavy wood, including the particularly resistant azobé (or red ironwood) variety – that he sourced on site in the Antwerp docks and which he treated with the utmost care in his studio, which was simultaneously a warehouse and a creative space. He did not make any major alterations to his material, but instead tried to tease out its inherent energy and create a sculptural dynamic by combining several individual pieces. He even went so far as to claim: “I do action painting with wood, with sculpture.”3 “When I put pieces of wood together, grouping them or stacking them, that is an expression of a certain decision that I have made. The gesture is very important to me ... .”4
In the exhibition, we see two constellations of wooden beams that intersect or are placed on top of one another, which eminently exemplify Lohaus’s work as a sculptor. Although his works are generally not ascribed any meaning in terms of content, one can nevertheless feel the existential urgency in the artist’s sculptural arrangements, as is often discussed in critical appraisals of his work.5
With this in mind, if we look back at Sara Sizer’s paintings with their pointed, suggestive titles, such as Voice, Calling, Answer, or Stay, which are at once evocative of communication and exchange, we can discern a correspondingly physical, existential interpretation, inasmuch as individual elements are layered on top of each other, touching or leaning towards one another, which could connote ‘bodies,’ coalescing as a whole. Sizer herself sees this as “a metaphor for human interaction. The colour, materials and everything else, is in support of this basic interaction”. Furthermore, she detects a convergence with Lohaus’s work: “I think the same could be said for Bernd.”6
At the same time, her painted, seemingly sculptural formulations are vaguely reminiscent of modern architecture, a theme that is also echoed in the cardboard boxes from Lohaus’s late work, which he treated with dark wax, some of which are standing open and are also part of the exhibition. He himself commented on them as follows: “These are architectural models transposed into sculpture. I place them on tables to create a space that could be an urban space. I call them ‘models’ because of their reduced dimensions.”7
As a result of this illuminating survey, Sara Sizer, Bernd Lohaus, his estate and the gallery have enabled an engaging interaction with these expanded ‘dimensions,’ be it in the relationship of the abstract works to one another in terms of their size or in the scope of how we might read them: it takes us – associatively, from piece to piece – on a kind of promenade from the exterior to the interior, from the docks back into the urban landscape, and from the bleached and painted velvet fabrics and their formal harmonies to inklings of social togetherness. A sensual and intellectual ‘promenade’ which – particularly in this day and age – will abide in our memory.
2 Sara Sizer in an e-mail to the author in January 2024.
3 Bernd Lohaus. Quoted from the text “Il n’y a pas de hazard” by Denis-Laurent Bouyer in the exhibition catalogue Bernd Lohaus, MuHKA (1995) in the essay “At Home in Language: The Sculptures of Bernd Lohaus” by Dieter Schwarz in the monograph Bernd Lohaus – IM SEIN BEI. 1940 2010, Thomas Desmet and Stella Lohaus, eds (Antwerp and London: Bernd Lohaus Foundation/Occasional Papers, 2019), pp. 375–403, p. 380.
4 Bernd Lohaus. Quoted from a conversation with Bernard Marcelis (1980) in the essay “At Home in Language” in Bernd Lohaus. IM SEIN BEI. See note 3, pp. 380 and 382.
5 These become even clearer in the exhibited work DIR (YOU) from 1981 or others, in which he labelled individual elements with words, such as “Ich” (I), “Du” (You), “Echo”, “Klänge” (Sounds), or simply with the names of people close to him.
6 Sara Sizer in an e-mail to the author in January 2024.
7 Bernd Lohaus. Quoted from a conversation with Denis Gielen (2004) in the essay “At Home in Language” in Bernd Lohaus. IM SEIN BEI. See note 3, p. 398.