NORBERT PÜMPEL

Curated by Lothar Tirala

(*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations II)

 
OPENING 15th Novenber 2018, 7 pm
Opening address: Lothar Tirala, Kunstraum Innsbruck Chairman
Introduction: Harald Kimpel, art historian, Kassel
Handover KRI solidaritaet#19_01 by Norbert Pümpel to all 2019 members    

“What a picture has to say, it says itself,” 

Norbert Pümpel described his artistic approach in 2016. The quote is short and precise, but it perfectly represents the intelligently branched cosmos of his artistic practice, which feeds on a network of perceptual theories between art and science. In his works, analyses of autonomous, overlapping perceptual levels meet scientific regularities, which only exist, or also don’t, because the picture says what it is, and not because the artist speaks on its behalf. Pümpel grants the pictures its aesthetic autonomy, just as he grants the observer his individual perceptual accomplishment in capturing and assessing an artwork’s compositional strength. The artist subtly balances along the matrix of simultaneously existing perceptual theories derived from mathematics and physics (especially nuclear and quantum physics), posing basic questions on the depictability of the present.  

Against this background, we could spin the above mentioned quote a little further, by saying: “What a picture has to say, it says itself. And it’s up to ourselves to think it further.” In keeping with the irony of this approach, Pümpel interrogates the observer on what he actually sees, or has been told to see. This becomes all the more obvious when looking at the exhibition’s title, a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.”*
(*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations II)

A paradox that not even science could depict any better, as for example in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, when two perceptual planes overlap, which materialise the existence of something, the cat, and at the same time dematerialise it.

Norbert Pümpel, born in Innsbruck in 1956, began his artistic career in the late seventies in the field of Concept Art. He refused being trained at an art academy and studied mathematics, physics and philosophy instead (without gaining a degree). As an autodidact, he develops image concepts in a field bordering on the sciences. “For decades, Pümpel has dealt with philosophical and scientific problems, which in his conceptually oriented art are given pictorial form. Space-time problems, very much occupying artists since the early twentieth century, material emanations, questions of quantum physics and the theory of probability inspire his thinking as an artist.” (Christoph Bertsch, 2007) Pümpel combines art and science. The confrontation with nuclear physics, quantum theory, but also with Ludwig Wittgenstein is made visible by the artist as a gradual process of approach, and at the same time repulsion. “There is an aspect about the scientific that is far from any measurable exactness, without determinism and logic. Evidence and predictability turn out to be illusions.” (Norbert Pümpel, 04.05.2013)  

It is not much of a surprise, consequently, that it’s mainly long-term projects that Norbert Pümpel is interested in. In his analyses he deals, among many other things, with Erwin Schrödinger’s cat paradox (2005–2008), as well as Wittgenstein’s endeavours to fathom the limits of perception and the possibility of the picture in the light of modern science. “That which Norbert Pümpel sets out on canvas or paper is impressions, which are left behind, as the artist says himself, when a part of the universe reflects the universe.” (Harald Kimpel, 2005) That the human being exposes his universe to constant danger, and that mass destruction has become the abstract code for the splitting of atoms, he depicts in his work series Dark Lightings (2009–2012), showing deserted landscapes and the nuclear fallout from the nuclear tests after World War II, or the Sedan Crater Projects 01–05 (2008–2017), presenting a crater on an American test site which, with a diameter of four hundred metres, is visible to the naked eye from outer space.  

In 2010, Norbert Pümpel said this on the subject: “Besides the epistemological progress, though, the potential has increased for radically wiping out all life. Besides the striving for preservation, safeguarding, and possibly also improvement of the condition of humans on the globe, the sciences, first in physics with the nuclear bomb, later also in biochemistry and biology, though, have been developing an unprecedented arsenal of principal options for turning the globe into a lifeless desert. In every algorithm of cognition lies hidden the grammar of destruction. Political strategies and the established economical practices admit no real hope for the risk potential to decrease.”  

“Sculptures are being and nonbeing of matter,”

says Norbert Pümpel, who has a preference for the material of wood, about his own sculptures in 2010. Also in his sculptural work, he sticks to his method of examining what we interpret and what we actually see. His sculptures he often furnishes with recesses, that he then closes up again with layers of silicone, as if the sculpture was able to feel the phantom pain whose blank Pümpel has opened up and then reclosed. The sculpture stands for the hidden and the destroyed, the injury and the healing. This is the background against which we can also understand the central sculpture in the exhibition, Und sieht das Kind die Kiste nun als Haus, which consists of two cube-like wooden objects and a silicone object.    

Exhibition concept: Lothar Tirala, Kunstraum Innsbruck Chairman  

Text: Karin Pernegger, Director Kunstraum Innsbruck 

ART FOR YOUR MEMBERSHIP 2019! KRI
solidaritaet is an oakwood multiple (coming in an edition of 90 copies) by Norbert Pümpel, which we give out to our members on the evening of the opening. In 2018, the artwork given away was created by Eva Schlegel, the year before by Hans Weigand.  

EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION PERIOD

OPENING
15th Novenber 2018, 7 pm
SO WE INTERPRET IT, AND SEE IT AS WE INTERPRET IT.*
(*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations II)

ARTIST TALK
4th December 2018, 7 pm
ASPEKTSEHEN UND ASPEKTWECHSEL
Aspektsehen und Aspektwechsel: Spuren Wittgensteins im Werk von Norbert Pümpel. Ilse Somavilla, Wittgenstein expert, and Lothar Tirala in conversation with the artist.