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What You Need to Know: German artist Christina Kruse has honed a distinctive sculptural lexicon of abstracted figural forms, oftentimes balancing rounded shapes against plinth-like rectangles. In her new exhibition “Plasterheads” at New York’s Helwaser Gallery, the artist presents recent sculpture, including Lunapark (2021), a never-before-seen installation of a miniature world in which itty-bitty figure-like maquettes appear set amid architectural elements. Also on view is an installation of four sculptures, with contrasting volumetric forms. Made of wood, marble, plaster, and soapstone, these works offer a calming sense of steadiness. 

Why We Like It: Kruse’s sculptures possess the kind of exuberant imagination and playfulness usually associated with childhood. Here, her small, human-like maquettes are each caught in a world of individual activities and motions, climbing, looking, exploring, each on their own. One is drawn into inserting all sorts of narratives onto their inanimate forms. 

What the Gallery Says: “Her works expand on the formal and metaphorical binaries that can be found between the dynamics of the two antimonious installations—play/rest, chaos/order, and instability/balance. Building on her fascination with interior and exterior states of being, Kruse’s latest works trace a connection between the formal practice of sculpture and the psychological conditions of continuous becoming.”

Christina Kruse
Lunapark (2021)
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Christina Kruse, The Directionalist (2021). Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

Christina Kruse
Intermission (2021)
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Christina Kruse, Intermission (2021). Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

Christina Kruse
The Directionalist (2021)
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Christina Kruse, The Directionalist (2021). Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

Christina Kruse
Will o’ the wisp (2021)
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Christina Kruse, Will o’ the wisp (2021). Courtesy of Helwaser Gallery.

“Christina Kruse: Plasterheads” is on view at Helwaser Gallery through July 30, 2021.