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The work of “Hagel,” is the result of the collaboration between two Leipzig artists, Paule Hammer and Sebastian Gögel. In contrast to the painters of the Leipzig school, Gögel and Hammer seek, in their work, the use of sculpture and spatial installations as media of expression in order to place pop over the sublime, thus combining a vital, penetrating power with a clever, sharp wit. |
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Dance on the Dancefloor – Paule Hammer and Sebastian Gögel
The work of “Hagel,” is the result of the collaboration between two Leipzig artists, Paule Hammer and Sebastian Gögel. In contrast to the painters of the Leipzig school, Gögel and Hammer seek, in their work, the use of sculpture and spatial installations as media of expression in order to place pop over the sublime, thus combining a vital, penetrating power with a clever, sharp wit.
Sebastian Gögel and Paule Hammer have been collaborating on sculptural installations since 2005, combining the anthropomorphic characters from Gögel’s painting with Hammer’s associative configurations of drawings and collages. For both artists, the surface of the canvas is not enough; their expansion of the painted surface to the surrounding space is first of all due to an expansive pleasure in painting itself.
Their collaborative works move among the disciplines of installation, painting and sculpture. They play with image and text, abstraction and comics, mobilizing oil paints, latex, cloth, construction foam, aluminum foil and modeling clay. Their playful designs, created with easy gestures, usually treat the everyday with a wickedly funny visual humor, until it tips over into the grotesque, making elements of horror transform into the weird bits of everyday life. Their three-dimensional escapades are at once macabre, restless and unmercifully entertaining.
With all their relics of pop culture, ironic adaptations of kitsch and horror, and apparent homage of chaos, the works of Gögel and Hammer are outfitted with their own perceptual program—one that consciously plays on the arbitrary in an ironic, nasty, laconic and defiant way, and one that employs provocation and the sources of irritation in a calculated fashion.
Sebastian Gögel and Paule Hammer recently presented a large, original sculpture and collaborative paintings for their US debut at Chung King Project in LA.
