In his first solo outing, French sculptor Edgar Sarin uses several objects in an aim to create an atmospheric “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or a “complete work of art.” As such, the audience is encouraged to approach the entirety of the exhibition as a single artwork.
The work that also lends its title to the exhibition, Hierarchisch angeordnete Edelgesteine, dreizehn (Hierarchically arranged Gemstones, thirteen), is composed of 13 wooden crates—the contents of which remain a secret—that had previously been furtively buried in a Berlin forest since last October.
Sarin unearthed these boxes for the March 3 opening, upon which he installed them in the gallery, with instructions for them to remain sealed. The end of the exhibition will see them again interred in an undisclosed location.
In the meantime, the work’s purchaser will be given substitute boxes, intended to be passed on to the buyer’s descendants. It is only after precisely 100 years have passed that the work’s owner will be given the original wooden boxes—in whatever condition they may be—thus playing on the overall ideas of the revealed versus the hidden, and imagination versus fact.
Sarin intentionally withholds information regarding the boxes’ contents in order to provoke the viewer’s own personal projections of what they might hold.
“All I am doing is creating images then shielding them from one’s eye for a certain amount of time,” Sarin says of his work. “Therefore a latency comes between the possibility of an image and its obtainment. I believe the genuine work of art is here, during this latency.”
Other works on view include sculptures and framed works on paper that incorporate gold, brass, wood, Paris stone, wax, concrete, sun-dried flowers, clay, air and water. Conceived by the artist to be “relics,” they are composed of materials he collected during his process of working on Hierarchisch angeordnete Edelgesteine, dreizehn.
Edgar Sarin was born in 1989 in Marseille, France, and lives and works between New York and Paris. He is the winner of this year’s Prize Emerige, which is awarded annually to French artists under 35.
Edgar Sarin, “Hierarchisch angeordnete Edelgesteine, dreizehn” is on view through April 13, 2017 at Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin, 10969 Berlin, Lindenstrasse 35.