Art.

Darkness loves to hide.

Under the title Darkness loves to hide, Philipp Messner presented a selection of his magnet works (objects and pictures) for the first time at Kunstraum München. The sculptor seeks out and uses a wide range of materials to give an adequate, mostly abstract form to his questions and observations on themes such as the changing notion of individuality at the start of the digital age (keyword: control), the human-made transformation of our environment (keyword: Anthropocene) or the fragility of political systems (keyword: populism).

This form can be transitory and fluid, as his works with artificial and coloured snow show; it can penetrate solid structures, as his dye samples in plaster and marble reveal; or it can coat the shape of familiar objects in a monochrome, morphological layer, as his series of magnet works since 2008 demonstrates.

This last group comprises various found objects such as branches, stones, boxes, lamps and paper, which are wrapped in or partly covered with a magnetised material and then dusted with iron powder. The magnetic force binds the iron dust to the carrier object, while the field of force determines the arrangement and alignment of the filings. Messner makes use of magnetism itself, the effect of invisible forces, without overplaying the appeal of this mechanism.

The sculptures thus oscillate in the realm of the approximate and become something new: the wall pieces coated in iron powder are transformed into a third state and open themselves up to very different readings of nature and technology, since they materially combine both — complemented by the act of Messner as producer, which ends where the material follows its physical destiny.