Nicole Wermers

It’s hard not to be seduced by Nicole Wermers’ abstract collages, such as Katzensilber III (Fool’s Gold III, 2004), one of a series made from reproductions cut out of old illustrations from books of mineral specimens. Pink, ivory and sapphire-coloured crystals of the kind that New Age followers believe exert spirit soothing forces are arranged like glowing shards of a broken mirror that seem to grow off the page. Another group of untitled works from the past couple of years looks more like a set of compositional excursions into Geometric Abstraction, Constructivism, Op Art and Minimalism. These depict abstract three-dimensional spaces or slightly mystical-looking shapes and fields that generate a pleasantly hypnotic visual hum.

The coloured paper Wermers uses for these collages are usually background surfaces excised with a discerning scalpel from glossy magazines. This critical recycling detaches them from their role of creating a ‘classic and timeless’ modern ambience for luxury products, although they are then consciously reconstructed in order to create another such product. At the same time the works encourage a somewhat illicit pleasure in formal characteristics such as how light reflects on a material, tonal gradations and the arrangement of forms and colours within a given plane.

In exhibitions Wermers has combined her collages with free-standing sculptures that deliberately create uncertainty in the viewer’s mind about their status as art by aping some of the functionally oriented vernacular manifestations of sculptural modernity. Like her collages, they combine art-historical references and seem unapologetic about their attractive shapes and surfaces. Examples include her plinth-like, waist-high ‘ashtray’ sculptures, such as those in the series ‘French Junkies, 1–11’ (2002), made from Minimal and Formalist sculpture’s materials of choice, including both shiny and rusty metal. Scattered strategically, they look too arty to be intended for use, although at some showings they cradled squashed butts with lipstick traces. In more puritanical non-smoking institutional environments the white sand in their metal trays remains tantalizingly unsullied, like a distant miniature beach in a holiday poster.

Smoking can begin as something to do while you’re nervous or waiting for something to happen, or as an alternative to standing around with clenched jaws or a gaping mouth – which is why it’s so popular among artists at openings. Wermers’ sculptures anticipate this and beg the worrying question of which has more inherent value to her audience – their function or their elegant Modernist forms? Considering that ashtrays, which used to be as common as potted plants, are now an endangered species as far as interior fittings go, their presence is also somewhat anomalous. Their increasingly taboo function provides an excuse for Wermers to explore decorative and Formalist abstraction, which is arguably also taboo, and perhaps rendered all the more enticing as a result.

Wermers’ sculptures also play off the aesthetic feedback between architecture, design and advertising on one hand and visual art on the other, even though the relationship between these fields is lopsided, or a complete inversion of what the early 20th-century avant-garde imagined would do everybody good. Still, it is possible to see in nearly every inanimate object, surface or image some kind of art reference – a sort of mild delusion common among art-makers. Wermers’ scale models of abandoned shops ‘Vacant Shop 1–4’ (1999–2001), a barricaded room and a Modernist church emphasize the surplus aesthetic value generated by models of real situations. Similarly her video Palisades (1998), showing inverted foyers, converts ordinary architecture into expansive abstract spaces studded by fields of lights simply by holding the camera upside down. A recent proposal for a public sculpture also involved not just the simple conversion of a building but also its gendering, by piercing its side with a pearl and pink teardrop ear-ring Ohrring (Earring, 2005).

Another droll sculpture series resembles variants on the pairs of shoplifting detectors that stand guard (or pretend to) at the exits of most retail outlets. In Wermers’ recent exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, ‘Chemie’ (Chemistry) sculptures flanked fictional thresholds like menacing bouncers. Aside from making an ironic joke by suggesting that every art space is ‘just a shop’, they also announced that there was nevertheless something of value that ought to be protected and shouldn’t be removed – perhaps the idea of value itself.