Back to the Future / George Steinmann, Lofty Dryness. A growing Sculpture, 2003–2024

List of Works

This exhibition opens a series of programing entitled Back to The Future, that will address climate catastrophe through activating the extensive archive of Kunsthalle Bern. We are thinking of re-cycling, as a process of remembering, honoring and highlighting. Back to The Future resurfaces questions that were asked in the past but are still pertinent today, and might hold answers for our future.

We begin with an intervention by Swiss artist George Steinmann, who revisits his work Lofty Dryness from the 2003 group exhibition Danger Zone (Alpen) at Kunsthalle Bern, that was concerned with the melting of the glaciers, still a burning issue in Switzerland today. Steinmann’s overall practice is characterized by a dedicated interdisciplinary approach informed by Western and non-Western science, thinking through ecological principles such as symbiosis and interdependency. Viewing himself as part of the ecosystem, he has worked with natural materials these last decades, producing his own pigments, collecting specimens, while photographing, painting and sketching the traces of ecocide.

Over the course of the exhibition, the entire installation will constantly change and grow, transforming past materials into the present. Steinmann will be working on what he calls a “growing sculpture”, an installation that will develop over the coming months. For the artist, this process involves vagueness: “The growing sculptures are always in a state of flux. Something grows, transforms, but also dies.” Steinmann imagines an art guided by the cycles and rhythms of nature, rather than the accumulation of linear, quantitative progress.

Statement by George Steinmann, 2015:
What Change Can Art and Culture Achieve