Past

Michael Würtz Overbeck: Parable of Love

2 Sep – 22 Oct 2016

Based on the human pursuit of meaning and truth, the exhibition addresses existential themes, taking the absurdity and transience of life as its guiding premise. With death as their leitmotif, the works gathered here challenge our fundamental concepts and perceptions of the world, asking what really matters in the face of the meaningless of life.

Overbeck has transformed the upper gallery at Overgaden with a total installation that locates the works in a labyrinthine universe. Any potential overview is thwarted, as the visitor is led by an architectural structure that only offers one path, and where the darkness and narrow corridors create a sense of spatial dislocation. Fabric draped from the ceiling to the floor forms a narrow chasm of vertical waves that lure the visitor further inside. Smoke in a glass case makes light strangely apparent instead of obscuring it, and infinite diagonal reflections blur the facial features of the visitor to the point of unrecognizability. In Parable of Love a distorted and divided universe unfolds, a universe where meaning is sought but where any sense of coherence disintegrates.