Polyethylene

These sculptures were created for the exhibition “Almech” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin: the venue was converted into a workshop for the duration of the show, temporarily relocating the artist’s father’s company, Almech, which is based near Warsaw and produces plastic containers.

The staff of the Deutsche Guggenheim, a fair number of people from the art world, but above all members of the public had the opportunity to take part in this collective creative project: the Polish assistants of Pawel and his father travelled to Berlin to make plaster casts of participants’ faces, which they then mounted on metal structures. The forms of the sculptures were then modelled using plastic to coat the metal structures, like a “synthetic white flesh”.

The result of this collective creative process, open to the public, takes the form of this crowd of pale sculptures: part zombies, part creatures from an unknown civilization. In parallel to the exhibition in Museion, there was also a solo show devoted to Pawel Althamer at the Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany (29.05 – 06.10.2012); the two events were connected by a performance.

A key part of Althamer’s work is indeed based on breaking down the boundaries of an institution, or at least rendering them fluid, and this occasion featured a continuation of the project “Common Task”. This project saw a group of people from Brodno and friends of Pawel’s, all dressed in gold clothing, travelling on a gold plane to Brasilia, Brussels, Oxford and Mali. On occasion of Common Task 2012 a golden bus transported the Polish group to South Tyrol and then on to Munich.