Walter Berger
:
Radnetz Y N° 1
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Wheel-Web Y N° 1 is the title of the spider's web-like object by Walter Berger spanned between two baroque houses in the historic city centre of St. Pölten. Rising from the roof ridge in the upper third of the walls to the houses, the network of platinum-plated steel wire follows the construction of a garden spider's web exactly.
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Tender and unobtrusive, striking only to a keen and sensitive eye, something familiar and yet irritating stretches between two baroque houses in the historic old town of St. Pölten. Is it a motif familiar from films that crops up in our memory, one that plays on our fears? A net hovers above us as if a vast spider-like creature had found its way here, although the monster lurking for prey is absent.
An irritation that forces one to think: the almost weightless object proves to be an artistic creation borne of complex motifs. Nature is being imitated and monumentalised. A visual trap has been installed, discretely two-levelled that between the walls of the city does more than evoke memories of childish experiences as if a face and hair were enveloped in the sticky threads of a spiderweb, in a quiet and creepy forest.
Walter Berger's artificial web, which very exactly follows the pattern of a web made by a black widow spider, of platin-plated steel wire alludes to the relationship to nature reflected not only in Romantic sensibilities but also in the principles of order governing the cosmos. In an ironic manner, with the critical thinker's reserve, Berger goes on to remind one of the now all to ubiquitous term of the inexorable progression of "networks and the web" on our planet. With his homage to a natural wonder, the artist also addresses existential and social issues.
(Wolfgang Hilger)
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