Previously exhibited at Kunstmuseum Trier for the Robert Schuman Art Price.
Anni Mertens works with ceramics, steel, found objects and a healthy dose of humour. Her sculptural work embraces both abstraction and disfiguration, the same as precision and looseness. Once her individual sculptures are grouped together on diverse structures, they form a theatre of the absurd.
Anni playfully bends, coats and twists materials in such a way that it is hard to distinguish what’s solid and what’s porous, what’s delicate and what’s not. The skeuomorphic objects that make up the installations find common ground in their relationship with the body. These objects situate themselves somewhere between extensions and analogies of the body, playing visual and spatial games as they form a trail, seeking poetic coherence between shape, colour and textures bending and flexing concrete and ceramics while exploring the limits of their material capacities. The inspiration of the play-drive or the play impulse, explains why there are always playful elements coming back in her installations. Intuition plays an important role in her process, so she follows the material and the material follows back. The assemblage of sculptures refer to our journeys which are filled with the unexpected, questioning how we grow throughout these journeys and do we ever outgrow the urge to play?