Wir überwinden Grenzen

* Born 1959 in Grevenbroich; German sculptor, lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Wilhelm Mundt (*1959) is one of the outstanding sculptors of the middle generation. Mundt, who studied under Tony Cragg at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, among others, has been one of the pioneering artists of so-called postmodernism since the 1980s. He began with large-format, mostly site-specific spatial installations that placed industrial manufacturing processes and function-dependent formal inventions in autonomous artistic contexts.

Mundt's artistic design was and is often staged as a "work performance". The performative aspect of his work is documented in musical performances as well as in films, which he shoots parallel to his sculptural works. In this respect, Mundt can be seen as one of the most important representatives of a generation of artists who practice a multimedia or multivalent cultural crossover: a blending of art and life, of everyday life and aesthetic practice.

Mundt's comprehensive artistic approach, combining aesthetics and ethics, irony and seriousness, which is also related to Joseph Beuys or Roman Signer, still characterizes his work today. For this reason, his works go far beyond neo-Dadaist gimmicks or puristically self-referential experiments with form. In the best sense, they are transformations or transmutations of the (banal) experienced or (trivial) lived into meaningful, sensually tangible beauty.

The "Trashstones" series of works in particular, which Wilhelm Mundt began in 1989 with Stein 001, shows the artist as a personality who reflects on the sculptural traditions or conventions of modernism (or their breaks in form) and at the same time renews them in their "content", in their intellectual and technical penetration. This makes Mundt one of the most innovative sculptors of the present day.

The Trashstones, the "waste stones", which are precisely not trash, although the source material actually consists of garbage, studio residues or simply found objects that are sometimes also significant for the artist's biography, are created by Mundt in a complex, very labor-intensive process. After bundling the objects - from foam to paint tubs to bicycles - and wrapping them in films of different densities, the resulting blanks are encased in several layers of GRP, then sanded and polished.

In addition to their high aesthetic value, the stones also have current social relevance. Not only do the stones continue and redefine genre transgressions such as those of Hans Arp or Frank Stella, they also "incorporate" economic and ecological problems and visualize them in an object-immanent way: Art as a value-creating recycling system; ideas and things are not treated indifferently or thrown away, but preserved in a revaluing way - a cycle from the mindless to the sublime.

^{from: www.museumliner.ch}

wikipedia de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Mundt