|
Huber’s work has always
revealed a concern with the origin of the work of art (the creative process)
and its final display (in a museum or gallery), just as buying art can be
seen as a symbol for making a sacrifice to obtain beauty. Thomas Huber’s
project ‘The Post’ (shown at Galerie Akinci in 1991) refers to the journey
made by the image from its place of origin (the studio) to its final
destination (the place where it is exhibited: the gallery, the collector’s
home or the museum space). ‘The Post’ can be seen as a metaphor for the
transfer of the content of the image (the message) to the spectator, in
which the artist’s role is that of a ‘postman’. Huber’s most ambitious
project, ‘The Bank’ (exhibited in the Centraal Museum Utrecht, Kunsthaus
Zürich and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 1992/93) is based on the power of art
that is capable to purify the material value represented by money and to
transform it into beauty. Huber’s concept of ‘The Bank’ can also be seen as
a metaphor: a metaphor for the ideal situation of influencing people’s lives
through art. In another series of works with the title ‘Jacob’s Dream’
(exhibited in Galerie Akinci in 1997) the paintings function as a
demonstration of a liaison between their conceptual aspect and the material
reality of their painted surface.
Thomas Huber’s recent works
place more emphasis on the notion of the ‘pictorial space’. Following
Huber's thought, a picture is not an object but a place. A pictorial space
has a certain depth. It is this depth that determines the content of the
picture. Huber's paintings are often literally ‘full’. Sometimes the
pictorial space contains children playing; sometimes it contains Huber
himself or objects belonging to the artist.
Huber conceives of the
pictorial space as a place to live. The fact that paintings are open on the
spectator's side means that the spectator can enter the picture. According
to Huber, the painting is not a surface but a boundary, a dividing-line
between appearance and reality. Of course, something changes once you cross
the line. In that case, the painting is not reality but a different kind of
reality - a reality that cannot be translated into something present, but
one whose existence lies in its appearance.
A recent surveys of the work
of Thomas Huber has taken place at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in
Switzerland and Museum Krefeld in Germany November 2004 - March 2005 and the
traveling exhibition 'Rauten traurig' in Museum Marta Herford, Herford;
Musée d'Art Cont. Nîmes, Kunsthalle Tübingen (2008/2009)
|