COLOGNE.- The sculptor Gereon Krebber (*1973) presents with “blipplings” his 4th solo exhibition at Galerie Christian Lethert. With his new works he investigates issues like grotesque and decay as sculptural shape once again demonstrating his sense of form and his innovative use of unconventional materials.

Krebber presents a new large-sized sculpture, created for the entrance area of the gallery. Several entangled oval rings made of steel stand on thin steles. An unidentifiable stringy mass hangs from braces going through the rings.

Have you just entered a gallery or are you in the midst of a circus stage? Will the molecule-like construction start rotating or will one of Krebber’s other objects come alive in the next minutes and jump through these rings? Curiosity and horror, repulsion and attraction, the physical and the fantastic intermingle in the room. Lurking in the background is a subtle, tension-filled disturbance - as if something “un-dead” might come to life immediately.

A similar inner pounding characterizes his new wall works from the series “Surrogates” that he has been working on since 2007/08. Krebber shows these works in the adjacent room of the gallery. The material of these works also becomes nearly unidentifiable: Krebber uses conventional clear sello tape in uncountable layers around a plastic filling, perforated with heat and colored with spray paint. The perforation create holes of different size and depth. These kinds of ‘injuries’ open the view to the underlying colored layers and their interplay. While the artistic process is still the same, the spectrum of shapes and colors has been enhanced intensively.

The similarity between the abstract forms and biomorphic structures is the ambiguous feeling they evoke: Starting with the creation process that moves between construction and destruction, the works appear alive and organic, yet at the same time trigger associations of dissolution and decay. Fascination and horror are not mutually exclusive in Krebber’s oeuvre but rather two sides of the same coin.