Katja Strunz: Time of the Season
doggerfisher, until September 27

Doggerfisher, though barely two years old, is a gallery known for its bold choices, and Katja Strunz is no exception. The emerging German artist is preoccupied with the unstoppable march of time, and tries – through spartan sculpture and works on paper – to stop it.

This exhibition is not for the artistically faint-hearted. Strunz’s work communicates on a basic, instinctive level – up to a point. Beyond that point there are unsignposted references to German philosophy which would slip past the sharpest of minds, and the gallery – rightly or wrongly – makes no bid to elucidate.

A good starting point is the relentlessly spinning fan belt, wrapped around three old metal wheels which are fitted to the wall and run by a quietly throbbing motor. There is no end to the circular movement, which is rickety, comforting, pointless and inevitable. Meanwhile, time is stopped in its tracks next door as a mound of cheap gold jewellery hangs, like a frozen drop of molten metal, above the floor. The display on the digital watch, tangled up in the mess of gaudy chains, is empty.

Dominating the exhibition space are substantial darts of wood, like paper folded by some absent-minded giant, streaking up the walls. They give a nod to the sharp, clean lines of the 1980s design aesthetic, to the 1960s folded wall reliefs of Robert Smithson, and to the Constructivist design of the Soviet Revolution. All the same, one can’t help thinking these folds would be most at home in the reception area of a large financial institution.

More poignant is the bronze cast of a used honeycomb, three broken fragments propping each other up, wasted, abandoned, obsolete. Bees were born, worked and died in there, a perfect worker’s colony which may still exist as an entity elsewhere, although all the original workers are dead. It is this Hegelian philosophy which interests Strunz: a world patterned by recurring cycles, where the collective zeitgeist overrules and outlives individual beliefs.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 10.08.03