Nuri Koerfer
–
Shelfs
Neuer Essener Kunstverein
Nuri Koerfer's sculptural practice hybridises the autonomous artistic concept of the inoperative object with its counterpart, the object of utility. She playfully propels chairs, benches, shelves, and tables towards other, unintended forms of use, without abandoning their original functionality as furniture. In addition, the gravity of Koerfer's sculptures is altered by the intertwining of the normally strictly separate spheres of the animal world and furniture, the latter already offering numerous empty spaces for the weight of humans and their objects. Relationships and proportionality – initially genuine sculptural questions – expand from the formal to a more general level through these juxtapositions, without offering any rash answers or solutions.
The works in ‘Shelfs’, Koerfer's exhibition for the Kunstverein, focus less on furniture that suggests proximity to the human body or can even stand metonymically for it. Instead, attention is drawn to forms of spatial organisation of storage, containers of externalisation. This results in a new emphasis on height and verticality for Koerfer, which requires a more complex energy in terms of craftsmanship and practicality, but which, according to Rem Kohlhaas or Isa Genzken, can and should also create connections to the delirious. Perhaps, then, the central concept surrounding this practice is consciousness. Although it remains unclear where exactly and in what sense it can be applied to Koerfer's sculptures.
Nuri Koerfer (*1981) lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and at the Bram Shaw School of Art in London. She has had solo and group exhibitions at Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Melas Martinos, Athens; Lodovico Corsini, Brussels; and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, among others. She also co-programmed the MAVRA art space in Berlin. ‘Shelfs’ is Koerfer's first institutional solo exhibition.