German artist Anna Fasshauer makes Pop-ish, colorful works that bring to mind childhood games of pickup sticks, and the performative, process-based works of first generation feminist artists like Lynda Benglis. Fasshauer’s work also smacks of the cheerful soft sculptures of Swedish/American artist Claes Oldenburg, who found meaningful forms in the every day. Fasshauer’s works can resemble totems, or industrial cast-offs, or machines ill-suited for their roles. While the works enchant us with their peppy colors, they strike a weighty balance between heavy and light, abstract and figurative, masculine and feminine.
Fasshauer’s first sculptural works, of mysterious carpet-covered forms, bounced between Surrealism and the interactive experiments of Austrian artist Franz West’s, who saw his works “completed” only when the viewer was physically engaged with the works. She made a series of works using cars as her primary image, each a metaphor for our daily disasters.
Tallulah Rapsody is from Fasshauer’s latest body of work that resembles a squashed wind instrument, like a saxophone or clarinet. The artist chose the title Tallulah Rapsody because of its musical associations. “Rapsody” (in English rhapsody) is a one-movement composition, and “talulah” (or Tallulah, either an Irish girl’s name or an anglicized Choctaw name) means “water source,” which evokes the tinkly sound of water or a one-movement composition according to the artist.
The blue of the work was inspired by the sky in Marfa, Texas, the small town turned into an art world mecca by American artist Donald Judd where Fasshauer made the work. Judd took over an old army base to install his own work, and those of fellow Minimalist and Conceptual artists from the 1960s onward, whose experiments used industrial materials assembled in uninflected (non-expressionistic) ways to find truth through a universal visual language.
While Fasshauer’s work may mimic the classic geometric abstraction of artists like Mark di Suvero and Bernar Venet, her graphic abstraction is typically based on real people, or places, using linguistic slang and puns to give the viewer a clue to start unlocking the work’s meaning.
Fasshauer is in dialogue with these male artists. She shapes, twists and fastens stiff, industrial materials using her own physical capacity to render them soft, pliant and more evocative of the hand-made and personal. We can literally see how the artist has twisted the components of Tallulah Rapsody as she struggled with her large-scale straws—actually aluminum beams sourced from nearby El Paso—creating a cheerful piece that is both abstract and figurative. Like the wide-ranging experiments of German artist Isa Genzken that challenge the male-dominated history of contemporary sculpture, Fasshauer pushes herself and her materials as part of the next wave of global artistic feminism.
German artist Anna Fasshauer makes Pop-ish, colorful works that bring to mind childhood games of pickup sticks, and the performative, process-based works of first generation feminist artists like Lynda Benglis. Fasshauer’s work also smacks of the cheerful soft sculptures of Swedish/American artist Claes Oldenburg, who found meaningful forms in the every day. Fasshauer’s works can resemble totems, or industrial cast-offs, or machines ill-suited for their roles. While the works enchant us with their peppy colors, they strike a weighty balance between heavy and light, abstract and figurative, masculine and feminine.
Fasshauer’s first sculptural works, of mysterious carpet-covered forms, bounced between Surrealism and the interactive experiments of Austrian artist Franz West’s, who saw his works “completed” only when the viewer was physically engaged with the works. She made a series of works using cars as her primary image, each a metaphor for our daily disasters.
Tallulah Rapsody is from Fasshauer’s latest body of work that resembles a squashed wind instrument, like a saxophone or clarinet. The artist chose the title Tallulah Rapsody because of its musical associations. “Rapsody” (in English rhapsody) is a one-movement composition, and “talulah” (or Tallulah, either an Irish girl’s name or an anglicized Choctaw name) means “water source,” which evokes the tinkly sound of water or a one-movement composition according to the artist.
The blue of the work was inspired by the sky in Marfa, Texas, the small town turned into an art world mecca by American artist Donald Judd where Fasshauer made the work. Judd took over an old army base to install his own work, and those of fellow Minimalist and Conceptual artists from the 1960s onward, whose experiments used industrial materials assembled in uninflected (non-expressionistic) ways to find truth through a universal visual language.
While Fasshauer’s work may mimic the classic geometric abstraction of artists like Mark di Suvero and Bernar Venet, her graphic abstraction is typically based on real people, or places, using linguistic slang and puns to give the viewer a clue to start unlocking the work’s meaning.
Fasshauer is in dialogue with these male artists. She shapes, twists and fastens stiff, industrial materials using her own physical capacity to render them soft, pliant and more evocative of the hand-made and personal. We can literally see how the artist has twisted the components of Tallulah Rapsody as she struggled with her large-scale straws—actually aluminum beams sourced from nearby El Paso—creating a cheerful piece that is both abstract and figurative. Like the wide-ranging experiments of German artist Isa Genzken that challenge the male-dominated history of contemporary sculpture, Fasshauer pushes herself and her materials as part of the next wave of global artistic feminism.
German artist Anna Fasshauer makes Pop-ish, colorful works that bring to mind childhood games of pickup sticks, and the performative, process-based works of first generation feminist artists like Lynda Benglis. Fasshauer’s work also smacks of the cheerful soft sculptures of Swedish/American artist Claes Oldenburg, who found meaningful forms in the every day. Fasshauer’s works can resemble totems, or industrial cast-offs, or machines ill-suited for their roles. While the works enchant us with their peppy colors, they strike a weighty balance between heavy and light, abstract and figurative, masculine and feminine.
Fasshauer’s first sculptural works, of mysterious carpet-covered forms, bounced between Surrealism and the interactive experiments of Austrian artist Franz West’s, who saw his works “completed” only when the viewer was physically engaged with the works. She made a series of works using cars as her primary image, each a metaphor for our daily disasters.
Tallulah Rapsody is from Fasshauer’s latest body of work that resembles a squashed wind instrument, like a saxophone or clarinet. The artist chose the title Tallulah Rapsody because of its musical associations. “Rapsody” (in English rhapsody) is a one-movement composition, and “talulah” (or Tallulah, either an Irish girl’s name or an anglicized Choctaw name) means “water source,” which evokes the tinkly sound of water or a one-movement composition according to the artist.
The blue of the work was inspired by the sky in Marfa, Texas, the small town turned into an art world mecca by American artist Donald Judd where Fasshauer made the work. Judd took over an old army base to install his own work, and those of fellow Minimalist and Conceptual artists from the 1960s onward, whose experiments used industrial materials assembled in uninflected (non-expressionistic) ways to find truth through a universal visual language.
While Fasshauer’s work may mimic the classic geometric abstraction of artists like Mark di Suvero and Bernar Venet, her graphic abstraction is typically based on real people, or places, using linguistic slang and puns to give the viewer a clue to start unlocking the work’s meaning.
Fasshauer is in dialogue with these male artists. She shapes, twists and fastens stiff, industrial materials using her own physical capacity to render them soft, pliant and more evocative of the hand-made and personal. We can literally see how the artist has twisted the components of Tallulah Rapsody as she struggled with her large-scale straws—actually aluminum beams sourced from nearby El Paso—creating a cheerful piece that is both abstract and figurative. Like the wide-ranging experiments of German artist Isa Genzken that challenge the male-dominated history of contemporary sculpture, Fasshauer pushes herself and her materials as part of the next wave of global artistic feminism.
