Benjamin Houlihan | Victor Stuhl

This is Benjamin Houlihan's sixth solo exhibition at the Thomas Rehbein Galerie. Born in 1975 in Olpe, the artist received the Lothar-Fischer-Preis in May 2019. In 2020, a comprehensive solo exhibition of the award winner will take place at the Lothar-Fischer Museum in Neumarkt.

At times, the idealized closure of form in art has been brutally disrupted.

Avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism pushed the boundaries of the prevailing canon and aesthetic conventions, leading to the emergence of liberated yet simultaneously fragmented and shattered forms.

In Houlihan's recent works, the foundation is less about an emancipatory or provocative act and more about a concentrated engagement with design principles and formal possibilities. The playful exploration of former ideals of unity and perfection, symmetry and beauty serves to exhaust the fragility of form or figure in its versatility.

For the sculptures and drawings presented in the exhibition, the artist draws inspiration from the principle of the pop-up book, where the pages—illustrated with images of animals or people in typical poses and attire—are divided into individual sections.

Through the separate flipping of pages, the respective body parts of the depicted figures, along with their distinctive features, are mixed and recombined.

This results in skewed, no longer easily identifiable forms or hybrid creatures.

Accordingly, Houlihan folds a sheet of paper into equally sized sections, which he then flips and fills in with drawing techniques, where these disparate placements are loosely held together by an overarching idea of form or figure. In such cases, the artist may follow a conceptual image of a chair, a banana, a radiator, a face, or a vase, yet the structure of the drawing is detached from a logical construction of the respective form/figure.

Instead, the composition is determined by the folding technique and thus the division into individual fields.

This segmentation causes the individual subordinate units to detach from the closed formal context, especially since the drawing process itself unfolds in distinct, sometimes temporally staggered steps: The pencil is re-positioned in each section, the line is halted at the crease, and the stroke comes to an abrupt end. Jumps occur, interrupting the unified or holistic image and presenting it as fragmented forms.

The stylistic means employed also contribute to the further alienation and fragmentary appearance of the individual parts. A face is divided into four segments, each showcasing completely different artistic representations, despite all being drawn. While the hair is rendered with sparse and carefully placed pencil strokes, the underlying eye sockets are executed in deep black ink with a wash effect. One section further presents the highly abstracted chin area as a network of light curves, surrounded by dense graphite hatching. The contour of the neck and the neckline of a round-neck shirt reveal themselves as delicate, subtly indicated graphite traces.

In the abrupt transition between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation, divergent conceptions of form coexist on a single sheet: purely graphic sections seamlessly meet plastically modeled or densely compressed zones.

Chair, banana, radiator, face, and vase appear fundamentally inconsistent through this playful combination of incompatible design methods, oscillating between abstraction and figuration.

Even the sculpture of a banana, although cast in one piece, was created from a tin casting of four assembled pieces of different bananas—while maintaining the natural order of the sections. These four misaligned, shifted segments are united in a precarious balancing act, comically struggling for equilibrium. With a mischievous wink, Houlihan seems to parody sculptural considerations of statics and stability, as well as a symmetrical balancing act.

While disparate elements come together in a drawing or sculpture, the evident fragility of the form remains. The identity of the new creation, which cannot be identical to itself, arises not from the sum of its parts but from a heterogeneous collection of fragments.

Like the hybrid figures in pop-up books, Houlihan's artistic creations possess a discrepant nature. This grotesque—reminiscent of Frankenstein—multiplicity is not overcome by the enforced uniformity of the form.

Thus, this is not about deconstructing an object and reassembling the parts like a puzzle to restore lost unity. Nothing is repaired here, no soft transitions are created, and breakpoints are not concealed.

The deconstruction remains visible, as the aim is rather to shift the object for a better view. The incompatibility of the individual form sections signifies a change in perspective—the observation of the object, section by section. During the viewing, the object tilts, revealing various views and facets. Whether frontal, lateral, from above, or below: Houlihan plays with dimensions, jumping between angles and perspectives. Ultimately, the shift in perception reveals the transformation of the depicted subject in the eyes of the artist—and the viewer.
(Bettina Haiss, 2019)