The concepts of transition and transformation and their relation to color, forms and matter can be described as main subjects of Sebastian Wickeroth’s recent works.

Everything around us is passing through a process of continual change and transformation. This is not a very new cognition. Heraclitus described it 2500 years ago. His famous aphorism “πάντα ῥεῖ “ (Panta rhei) literally “everything flows” emphasized the eternal becoming of reality by comparing it to a river that only apparently remains one and identical, but which in fact continually renews and transforms itself. By combining elements of painting, sculpture and architecture, Wickeroth‘s deconstruction of geometrical shapes in their form and content can be seen as the development of this universal statement.

Cubes and walls are breaking up onto the floor. Simple materials like plasterboard walls, wood, styrofoam and enamel are turned into extensive, room- filling, site-specific interventions. Yet, while facing with each other, shapes and deconstruction are merging. Corrosion counters the monochrome perfection, generating a narrative. The ruinous pictorial space surveys suggest logic and causality of incidences that never happened. It`s not about the destruction of a sculpture, but to create decomposition as an equal mode of construction. Seemingly accidental and unregulated occurrences emerge as composed structures.

The glass works can be read and understood in different ways. On one hand there is a rather conceptual approach. The pictures seem three- dimensional objects, although there is no real, no actual picture. The frame, the glass and the empty space in the center of each piece de ne the works. In a way this constitutes a democratization of the picture. The color fields fade out towards the center, the center itself is empty. In this way the works build up a connection to the space surrounding them.

There is also another possible way of seeing these works. Apart from their formal and conceptual distinctness the works are characterized by a kind of painterly approach and a notion of landscape. The misty curtains of blue spray paint let us think unavoidably of the sky or the sea. We are surrounded by blue: the oceans, the sky above us, but we cannot touch it. Blue, the impalpable color, as soon as we approach it, it disappears.

One of Wickeroth’s most recent body of works is a series of picture objects that combine photography and spray paint on glass. All the photographs were taken in Iceland. In the artist’s mind, this landscape typifies, like no other place in the world, the constant state of transformation and transition. By combining these pictures to the fading spray paint Sebastian Wickeroth faces and reconciles the artist’s intervention and the natural processes of change.

Born in 1977, Sebastian Wickeroth currently lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He studied at the Kunstakademie Münster, at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Geneva, and at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He has been recently appointed research associate at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund.