Sorcha Dallas

Stumpf’s lovingly-made mixed-media objects, installations and text-based works possess an engaging cryptic quality, an aspect of the power of visual art to assert its resemblance to linguistic form. In this case, the throttling ciphers of vine, noose, chain, and rope – as well as dangling urban Pandora’s-boxes – possess a morbid syntax; what Rosalind Krauss might call ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Forest’ for its pungent element of Germanic gothic. Filtered through these dark collisions of nature and culture and a contemporary affinity for day-to-day materials is a persistent yearning for imaginative autonomy, as when the inanimate articles of folklore assume a life apart from their creators’ Ovidian whims.

Laurence Figgis, 2005

Born in Mannheim, Germany in 1969 Stumpf gained a Diploma from the State Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe (2001) and an MA (Fine Art) from Glasgow School of Art (2004). He is a current committee member of Transmission Gallery, Glasgow and a co-founder and curator of kaiserpassage 21a, Karlsruhe. Recent exhibitions include ‘Deb?ºtantenausstellung’ State Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe (2005); ‘Pilot 1, 2004’, London; ‘New Work Scotland 2004’, The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and EAST International 2003. Stumpf lives and works in Glasgow.

A limited edition publication and poster set will be available from the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

Gallery Commissioned Text:

by Ross Birrell, 2004

Michael Stumpf’s sculptural pieces draw on a wide range of cinematic and literary metaphors to create works that are both entertaining and allusive. He often employs laborious processes: cold-dyeing polo shirts, coating stags’ antlers in silver resin, soldering a wonky keyring that spells out the word ONCE. His materials are all of the kind that put up resistance: denim that he stitches, sculpted words twisted with a Marcel Broodthaers lilt. His work also draws on certain Gothic themes, perhaps pointing to his childhood in Mannheim, Germany. This range of influences is deftly incorporated in Stumpf’s objects and environments, generating an imaginative context for the audience that is engrossing but never pretentious. Although language plays an important role in his work, it is the essential thing-ness of his objects that is the most striking aspect of his practice. (Sarah Lowndes).

His hand-crafted mixed-media objects, installations and text-based works posses an engaging cryptic quality, ‘a morbid syntax, what Rosalind Krauss might call ‘sculpture in the expanded forest; for its pungent element of Germanic gothic’. (Laurence Figgis). Denim, plastic, aluminium, paper, pewter and other elements are used to conjur a material alphabet that manifests itself in the sculptures. As part of a broader linguistic system the sculptures function as semantic structures suggestive of a narrative. Fragments of text are present in the work in the form of posters, animated title sequences, or text-based casts. The installation of the work aims to capture a moment of an imagined narrative set in a fictional landscape:

‘Stumpf’s sculptures and installations are concocted from spliced together moments, combinations of images, objects and materials shifted from their original contexts and relocated within a new imagined narrative. These hybrid objects become an anthology of dislocated referents, each element functioning as part of a persistently elusive whole which, like a frozen frame in a movie or a torn out page in a book, offers the viewer only a partial glimpse, a displaced scene, a snapshot of a larger scenario.

Nature, culture, craft, decoration, cinema, folklore and literature collide and interweave in works to create a sometimes poetic, sometimes perilous material alphabet. The particularity of Stumpf’s sculptural vernacular imbues the objects with a curious internal logic, an absoluteness that makes them entirely plausible, and yet still slippery and enigmatic, like something half-remembered and then re-made with absolute conviction.’ (Albrecht Schafer & Michael Stumpf, International Project Space, 2005).

In 2004 Stumpf was awarded a research residency at Cove Park on the Rosneath peninsula in the West of Scotland. ‘At the Edge of the Night a Fairytale Ties Roses’, a bookwork with an essay by Ross Birrell, was published to document the project. Commenting on the use of language in Stumpf’s art, Birrell writes,

‘With the work of Michael Stumpf, we turn not so much to a systematic affinity between language and sculpture but to an elective affinity. Stumpf’s sculptural assemblages have a grammar all of their own. But the emphasis upon language in Stumpf’s work has little to do with the idea of sculpture as a negative condition without positive terms, that is to say, with the Saussurian linguistics which underpinned Krauss’s influential essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. Rather, the world of language to which Stumpf’s sculptures and other works relate is the incantatory and cryptic language of sorcery, mysticism, magic and spells. This is the point of the amateur and ad-hoc construction of his hybrid assemblages: they are a witch’s brew of makeshift mumbo-jumbo and inspired idiot voodoo. As an artist Michael Stumpf is more Mephistopheles than Faust. He has his eye on your immortal soul.’