Johannes Philipp Speder

In his solo exhibition SEIN&SACHEN, Hamburg-based artist Johannes Philipp Speder presents works from around thirty years of artistic creation. The exhibition is not intended as a chronological retrospective, but rather as a polyphonic juxtaposition of different phases of work, materials, and forms of expression. Sculpture, image, and writing enter into an open dialogue in which past and present question each other. Thirty years of work become thirty years of being.

At the center of SEIN&SACHEN are Speder's sculptures and text-based works, which together open up a dense field of tension. The sculptures unfold a broad formal spectrum: from clearly figurative bodies to hybrid mixed beings to almost abstract compositions. Many of the figures bear unmistakably human traits, while faces or individual body parts are masked by elements from flora and fauna. Others appear completely human or are almost entirely detached from figuration. What connects these works is a consistent examination of the body as a carrier of meaning—as a projection surface for identity, memory, and cultural attribution. The human being does not appear as a closed subject, but as a changeable, permeable form within a larger biological and cultural context.

A central conceptual basis for the exhibition is a calendar cycle of 365 SEINS formulations, which Johannes Philipp Speder has developed as a continuous series. The SEINS works in the exhibition emerge from this linguistic reservoir: enamel works in which individual formulations are translated into a precise visual form. The statements function as condensed impulses, as minimal interventions in everyday thinking. They do not formulate a program or instructions, but rather open up spaces of possibility: BEING is negotiated as a process, as a continuous movement between aspiration and experience, between self-design and lived reality.

SCHÖNSEIN, BEWAHRENDSEIN, GEFÜHLSEIN, GELIEBTSEIN – appear in stark black and white and are reduced to the essentials. In their poster-like clarity, they are reminiscent of strategies of conceptual art and text-based works of the 20th century, without adopting their didacticism. The language has an immediate, almost imperative effect, and it is precisely this that reveals its ambivalence. A field of tension opens up between normative assertion and individual experience, making social expectations as visible as their fragility. At the same time, the serial arrangement refers to art-historical concepts of repetition, variation, and temporality as carriers of meaning. This dialectic continues in the second room. The One Week Sculptures, each created within a week, bundle Speder's formal repertoire on a tiny scale. Barely larger than an iPhone display, they appear like condensed sculptural ideas. Bird heads, classical-looking torsos, and funnel-shaped legs combine to form hybrid figures in which art-historical quotations, personal imagery, and playful transgressions intertwine.

These works are complemented by black-and-white collages that operate with fragments, breaks, and rearrangements. Opposite them hang the overpaintings, collages in which parts have been deliberately covered, erased, or overwritten. These interventions refer to a clear vanitas motif: the visible is always threatened with disappearance, meaning never permanently secured. Visibility and omission become equal creative means, memory and transience enter into a silent interplay. Other sculptures such as ERASURHEAD, SPRINGMAN, and the small HÜTERINNEN structure the space like actors in an ensemble. Taken as a whole, the impression of a sculpture theater emerges, in which all of Speder's stylistic phases and formal approaches are present. The works relate to each other, take up motifs, vary them, contradict each other, and tell each other's stories. Walking through the exhibition becomes a choreographed experience in which the work does not explain itself, but rather unfolds.

In this way, SEIN&SACHEN unfolds an oeuvre that eludes clarity. Johannes Philipp Speder connects the human with the foreign, the physical with the linguistic, the archaic with the contemporary. The exhibition does not show a finished work, but rather an ongoing process, a living structure of thirty years of artistic work, experience, and continued questioning of being.
(Text: Eva Maria Asche)