14/07/2026
Hole to Hole
Veronika Brovall, Ralf Hoedt, Nico Ihlein, Florian Japp, Jennifer Jordan, Hans-Peter Stark, Tommy Støckel
Invited by SKULPTURENVEREIN
Opening: Friday, July 17, 6–9 pm
Exhibition in the Project Space's display window
17.07. - 21.08.2026
The sculptural hole is a multifaceted motif in art history. It functions both as a physical opening—perforation or cut—and as a conceptual void or absence that brings absences and the invisible into focus.
Performative hole-making likely began around a hundred years ago, when Francis Picabia punched a hole in a pamphlet. In the 1960s, site-specific interventions in buildings emerged (e.g., by Beuys and Gordon Matta-Clark), and in 1977, Walter de Maria drilled an Earth Kilometer for Documenta 6 in Kassel—a thousand-meter probe made of massive brass rods.
Earlier, the Italian artist Lucio Fontana had expanded painting into three-dimensional space with his pierced canvases and cut surfaces. He understood the hole not as emptiness but as the beginning of a sculpture in space and a transgression of the picture plane. Concurrently, Barbara Hepworth established her pierced sculptures, which guide the viewer’s gaze through a usually round opening in the form to the landscape or environment behind, thus creating an interaction between artwork and space. In contrast, Eva Hesse used perforation and void as central formal and psychological principles to break through rigid structures and make inner complexity visible.
The exhibition Hole to Hole, conceived by SKULPTURVEREIN at Axel Obiger, takes up such sculptural explorations—albeit in a decidedly lighter manner—bringing together seven highly diverse artistic works on the theme of the "hole" in a window display during this year’s holiday season (the so-called "summer lull"):
While Hans-Peter Stark’s work connects to Beuys’ intellectual universe, addressing the hole from a socio-political perspective, Florian Japp’s installation evokes the hole as an interactive, perhaps even athletic element. Veronika Brovall’s sculpture suggests the opening as a ritual sign connecting two worlds. In contrast, Jennifer Jordan transforms voids into plastic spaces with the softly cradled tubes of her hanging sculpture. Ralf Hoedt discovers the hole as a site-specific element, with nature appearing as a sculpture that stages itself through the view. In Nico Ihlein’s humorous vases, the technically necessary opening becomes a maw, and the Baroque sculpture beneath it a lively being. Finally, Tommy Støckel’s arrangements play with the specific exhibition situation, oscillating between a commercial display (perhaps technical?) of products and artistic intervention.
After all, the window itself is a large hole in the building’s façade, through which we glimpse the gallery space of Axel Obiger. Through the staggered exhibition design, the vitrine becomes a three-dimensional stage space that unfolds its special effect through its public accessibility and interaction with the urban environment. By consistently aligning Hole to Hole with this single-perspective window view, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior space, as well as between art and commerce.
Here, the hole becomes a structural element that connects the material and the immaterial, the foreground and the background, as well as functional order and artistic subversion. Whether as a physical opening, metaphorical gap, or strategic interruption, the works on display ask how holes—as deficiency, opportunity, or design principle—shape our seeing and thinking.
The exhibition can be seen permanently in the gallery’s window from July 17 to August 19.
www.skulpturverein.de
https://www.skulpturverein.de/
