Jürgen Drescher

Jürgen Drescher’s studio in Berlin is filled with objects and materials that hint in one way or the other on the absurdity of the human species’ endless need to produce, wrap, communicate, consume, and reproduce. There are empty cardboard boxes in various states of unfoldedness cast in aluminum, gigantic clouds of styrofoam, oversized drain plugs, and a wrapped condom the size of a large square panel painting. Wooden signs deliver no...

Jürgen Drescher’s studio in Berlin is filled with objects and materials that hint in one way or the other on the absurdity of the human species’ endless need to produce, wrap, communicate, consume, and reproduce. There are empty cardboard boxes in various states of unfoldedness cast in aluminum, gigantic clouds of styrofoam, oversized drain plugs, and a wrapped condom the size of a large square panel painting. Wooden signs deliver no message and show no direction, and silvery blobs form speech bubbles without content. The materials Drescher uses are mostly cheap, industrial, even vulgar, but their surfaces rendered shiny and seductive through highly elaborated and expensive coating processes.

Departing from the specific conditions of sculpture and its material, Drescher’s realistic-conceptual examinations raise deeply ethical questions regarding mankind as a species equipped with consciousness, and its simultaneous incapability of controlling the most trivial needs in regard to the global equilibrium. Drescher intentionally employs conventional figurative means such as carving and casting techniques as an aesthetic provocation to deliver content—the formability of consciousness, the (failed) attempts to appropriate nature through art and science—and at the same time demonstrating the limitations of artistic means. This is done however not without a sense of humor. “Realistic” sculptures of endangered animals such as tuna or gorillas, or Roadrunner piercing a dust cloud—in Drescher’s sculptures, deeply felt consent for all being is paired with a brutal sense of the absurdity of our existence and alleged progress, and sometimes a sonic wall needs to be sculpted to soften the outcry.

Eva Scharrer


All photographs © Gerald Imhof