AXEL LIEBER – Illicit Constructions
28 April – 30 June 2018

taubert contemporary is pleased to present Axel Lieber in the gallery for the first time during the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2018. The exhibition titled Illicit Constructions presents pieces of various work groups from recent years around a central, space-filling sculpture that was developed by the artist for this exhibition.
The title of the exhibition already refers to the fragility of some of the exhibited objects, but especially to the new sculpture, an intricate structure with architectural references. Source material for this are commercial comics which Lieber deprived of their narrative elements by removing the image information and blackening the speech bubbles, which elevates the remaining material, the leftovers, to actual “building material”. The previously inconspicuous frames oft the panels now become structural, constructive components that, when assembled continuously, generate a monumental architectural model. Through the perforated facade, another structure becomes visible inside, which is a smaller version of the outer one. Depending on how and from which perspective the visitor approaches the sculpture, his or her perception shifts between model and monument, with the inside and outside interweaving and forming a complex tapestry.
Axel Lieber always searches for the most distant point, the point at which his objets trouvés are still recognisable, but nevertheless receive an autonomous reality through a transformative act of reduction. He hollows out concrete objects semantically and makes fills the resulting gaps with new content and cavities in order to make the unknown visible in the familiar.
By deliberately reducing and eliminating everyday objects, Lieber gives his sculptures and installations a specific, humorous-laconic serenity, which contrasts the horror vacui, the ubiquitous fear of emptiness in the visual arts, with its own artistic attitude. He is not interested in or focused on the symbolically referenced, politically relevant or the meandering, extensively utilisable, but always the concrete entity for what it is – or is not.
Further works from the series of billboards, MKAs and paper works complement Illicit Constructions. Parallel to the Gallery Weekend Berlin, other works by Lieber will be shown at the art fair Paper Positions Berlin, which this year takes place in the Berlin headquarters of Telekom Deutschland, Jägerstrasse 42-44, 10117 Berlin.
Axel Lieber’s works are represented in many private and public collections, such as in the collection of contemporary art of the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, Germany and in the collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2017, a separate room was dedicated to his work in Kunstmuseum Bonn in Bonn, Germany. Furthermore, Lieber is co-founder of the artist collective inges idee, which has existed since 1992 and works on artistic projects in the public space.

Axel Lieber, born 1960 in Düsseldorf, Germany.
He lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Stockholm, Sweden.