Georg Ettl et Séverine Hubard — Eva Meyer Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 17 → October 23, 2010

The two artists define themselves as sculptors. They are both interested in architecture, either to improve space as George Ettl does in the Neuss church, or to jubilantly demolish the pretence of prefabricated interiors as Sévérine Hubard’s short film, Trompe l’œil shows. Both artists are interested in public space because it should involve sincere reflection on politics, on democracy and on the role, which is scorned, that aesthetic thinking could play in it.
Georg Ettl is an artist of his time. Born in Germany in 1940, at the end of the 1950s, he trained in drawing and machine tool construction in Detroit (US) where he also studied art at Wayne State University. In the 1960s, he took philosophy courses at the Sorbonne. He is the very example of the multilingual, universalist artist-philosopher. In 1967, he took part in the exhibition “Other Ideas”, organized by Sam Wagstaff, with artists like Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Richard Tuttle. Starting in 1974, he gradually distanced himself from the gallery system and increasingly devoted himself to his projects and construction sites. When he returned to the object, with Atelier Ettl, in 1996, it was to offer simple and inexpensive creations, scenes of daily life, wood figurines, furniture, wallpaper, in which the technical ingenuity of the fabrication is linked to a drawing that retains all the witty qualities of his monumental works.
Séverine Hubard is an artist of her time. Born in France in 1977, she likes to say that an “artist has to move”. Her first exhibited works highlighted her marked taste for assemblage, the shift in point of view, the mechanism and the relationship. Although the object is one of her concerns, it is not predominant. Her work, except in rare instances, is not frozen in a single form. Destruction, reconstruction, transformation and updating enrich her gestures. And it is clearly here, with the idea of a project and work site with regard to community, around which the internal logic of the two artists turns. “It is more important today to take care of the visible world”, Georg Ettl said in an interview with Jean-Claude Lasserre (1), and Séverine Hubard would not disagree with him.
If there is a result in Georg Ettl — his productions are perfect –, it is not a formal desire but a requirement of simplicity and clarity that directly touches us, in such as way that his stylized figures paradoxically replay the infinite variation of our moods.
There are fêtes, energy and intelligence to be shared in Séverine Hubard and if she is inspired to make an object, the gesture from which it emerges will remain sublimely suspended.

(1) Georg Ettl, art & architecture, entretiens, éditions Château d’Oiron et Script éditions 1997.