Manfred Pernice

Manfred Pernice (born in 1963, Hildesheim, Germany) recycles humble construction materials, such as particleboard, concrete, steel, and cardboard, from the built environment and reconfigures them into open-ended sculptural propositions. His cylindrical sculptures or self-described ‘cans’ and rough-edged movable containers, for example, evoke abstracted interpretations of furniture or buildings stripped of their function. Pernice's objects and installations, as in Schild (Tempel), suggest invented architectonic forms yet retain traces of their past use or associations. Conceptually, his objects refer to neutral, commodified, and often overlooked sites from our surroundings: spaces through which people pass, transport containers, and places of rest or transition. Exhibiting the artist's characteristic architecturally ‘raw’ aesthetic, the works pose a series of indecipherable but provocative questions concerning history, time and space. Reflecting on the complex relationship between sculpture, visual art, architecture, city-building and human stories of time and place, Schild (Tempel) and Griechenland are in part inspired by the artist’s time spent in Greece since the late 1990s. The titles comment, somewhat ironically, on the conflation of old and new in contemporary Athens. The sculpture Griechenland brings together the artist’s motif of the ‘can’ with the found sign for a Greek restaurant probably come across in Berlin. Pernice humorously points to the use of the classical Greek sites, the origin of Greece’s significance, here reduced to the kitsch sign painting for a cheap restaurant.