The Dream of the Grand Tree and the Improbable Objects

Curated by Paco Barragán, Erika Harrsch: The Dream of the Grand Tree and the Improbable Objects hails the spectator into the wood of tree-sculptures and the dream of improbable objects that either maintain themselves with their feet proud on the ground or just a moment later decide to climb the walls undauntedly. Imbued with fine irony and humor, both the floor and the wall assemblages express atypical forms and astonishing materials like sea rocks, plastic, vinyl, steal and wood that have been assembled meticulously revealing a visually rich vocabulary that takes its inspiration among others from Courbet, Duchamp and the surrealists.

These three-dimensional compositions have what Heidegger referred to as unheimlich, as something close to estrangement and the idea of being out of time or suspended in time due to the staging of a series of binary associations that, on occasions, touch on the uncomfortable: masculine-feminine, intimate-voyeuristic, organic-inorganic, seductive-penetrating, fluid-solid, hard-soft and rooted-floating.

All these elements that at first sight seem disconnected allow Erika Harrsch to express a multifaceted, enigmatic and, at times, surrealistic artistic practice that keenly reflects the very contemporary tension between the need for a place and the idea of feeling out of place which haunts all of us in a more and more restless and volatile world.