TAIPEI.- Wolfgang Flad (Germany, b. 1974) graduated from the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and currently lives and works in Berlin. Renowned for his distinctive sculptural language, Flad departs from the weight and monumentality traditionally associated with sculpture. Employing wood, metal, glass, and recycled materials, he creates sinuous, irregular forms that embody organic vitality and tension. His solo exhibition at Tampa Museum of Art，his works by permanent collected the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Zürich, Centraal Museum Utrecht.
The exhibition title 《Wolfgang Flad: FORMA FUTURA 》directly articulates Flad’s renewed inquiry into the relationship between sculpture, time, and space. “Forma Futura” (Latin for “future form”) does not gesture toward a cold technological prophecy; rather, it addresses the sustainability and regeneration of organic life. For Flad, the future form is fluid and indeterminate—condensing the macrocosmic scale of galaxies and light-years with the microcosmic process of cellular division into a dynamic spatial present. Viewers are invited into a field that transcends physical time, entering a state in which subject and object dissolve.
Unlike the Western classical tradition that emphasizes monumentality and mass, and distinct from Constantin Brancusi's pursuit of purified, closed forms, Flad radically overturns the definition of sculpture as volume. He inherits the sensitivity to natural materials from Arte Povera master Giuseppe Penone. Technically, Flad constructs skeletal frameworks from plywood and timber, then pulverizes art criticism magazines and books—repositories of institutional and historical discourse—into pulp, which he uses to envelop the structure. This act of upcycling becomes a ritual of “reversing time”: past documents are transformed into the corporeal substance of sculpture. Through layers of paint and sanding, he produces surfaces that range from immaculately smooth to ruggedly textured. In stillness, his works radiate a tensile growth akin to extraterrestrial organisms, further inverting notions of solidity. Through perforation, entanglement, and the orchestration of negative space, sculpture ceases to be a mass occupying space; instead, it becomes light, anti-gravitational, and neural—liberating form from functional constraints into lines and energies that propagate infinitely through three-dimensional space.
Art historian Marc Wellman traces Flad’s work back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his dictum Panta Rhei (“everything flows”), articulating the concept of the “eternal transformation of being.” As sculptural subjects, Flad’s works possess both permanence and instantaneous dynamism; their origins and endpoints remain elusive. Within three-dimensional space, time animates matter. The interwoven, skeletal, alien-like structures are not inert objects but complex spatial narratives, revealing the perpetual transformation of material within the flux of existence.
This solo exhibition presents four new series, spanning freestanding sculptures and wall-based installations. The wooden sculpture series Structure intertwines timber and recycled media into hybrid formations reminiscent of bones and branches, balancing gravity and motion while harboring latent growth within stillness. The aluminum wall series Force of Impact subjects metal surfaces to erosion and indentation; polished sheen contrasts with rugged textures, staging an encounter among time, materiality, and self. The glass wall series Dark Side of The Moon evokes terrain shaped by billions of years of erosion. Through dual-toned glass, mirrored coldness, and flowing chromatic transitions, it reflects humanity’s longing for the cosmos and the return to self. The wall series Dust painting reuses ground remnants from sculptures, layering residual matter into pictorial structures—an affirmation of the indestructibility of material.
Wolfgang Flad: FORMA FUTURA is not merely an exhibition but a visual allegory of the future. In the Anthropocene, confronted with material excess and environmental crisis, Flad proposes a sustainable aesthetic through reverse transformation. Waste and rebirth are no longer binary opposites; fragments of past discourse become the substratum of future life. Suspended between presence and absence, these organic entities—seemingly from an as-yet-unreached dimension—breathe and proliferate quietly, inviting viewers to contemplate invisible currents of energy and to witness an ongoing, eternal becoming of form and essence.
