Florian Baudrexel

From Plastic Masses to Energetic Plastic Art. Florian Baudrexel (b. Munich 1968; lives and works in Berlin) is one of a generation of young artists who grapple with the sculptural genre. His sculptures, installations, and wall reliefs are dense clusters of threedimensional elements made of plaster, cardboard, polystyrene, and similarly ordinary materials. Baudrexel’s sculptural use of his materials echoes the Consturctivists Vladimir Tatlin’s and Alexander Rodchenko’s keen sense for compositional nuance, while the dynamism of the sculptures that result recalls the work of the Futurists Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. In their abstractness, Baudrexel’s works refer to the rhetorical dimension of human perception, to perspectives and movement. Lines, surfaces, and edges guide the gaze into the picture, gaining a pictorial, but also filmic quality. The sculptural spaces develop a similarly immersive pull out of vistas and the concrete use of the material. This book was produced in conjunction with Baudrexel’s latest show at the Kunstverein, Hamburg, for which he developed two different conceptions: a room of emptiness and a room of plentitude, whose expansive reliefs look like painting transmuted into sculpture. With essays by Annette Hans and Katharina Koppenwallner.