Bang Without Sound

By Poul Erik Tøjner

Stalke Gallery, Vesterbrogade 15: Thomas Bang "from place to place…" until April 29.

This is a quiet and beautiful exhibition of sculptural objects presented by Thomas Bang at the Stalke Gallery.

Bang, who has a long career in America with roots in minimalism among other things, demonstrates his ability to create his peculiar objects, which are characterized by an understated approach. They are never provocative regarding material choices or presentation. Bang combines inferior materials such as crumpled rags with more noble metals, copper, and the like. He is a perfectionist to his fingertips. He carefully lays the fabric and manages to add rounded arches and beehive-like shapes to it.

Furthermore, he patinates some objects in a way that is not so much about a colorful experience for the viewer but rather about a quiet waiting. The expression is generally restrained—though some of the pieces have a humorous aspect to them that can be striking. In that sense, Bang is reminiscent of the sculptor Marice Estève. It is something that pulls in another direction, a slightly demanding one, requiring a special visual language. He places his sculptures directly on the floor, ensuring that they establish a link to the space they occupy.

The combination of familiarity and the peculiar is also evident in his relief-like sculptures, which can resemble a portrait while simultaneously being something entirely different. His more installation-like works approach functionality—a gear, a coupling, or the like—yet these are assembled elements. His compositions rely on aesthetics rather than mechanics.

What unites Bang's objects is the interplay between the processed and the raw material. While his wall pieces might evoke brief, abstract landscapes, Bang's sculptures lean toward architecture—blending materials and spaces into harmonious unity. He creates strange structures that either contain something, twist and curl around themselves, or resemble mirrors, facades, or faces—whatever fits within the context. The faces and expressions, whether organic or constructed, dwell with the quietness of existence. In the space.

Thomas Bang.

The man of inner contradictions

Floor and wall objects. Galleri Stalke, Vesterbrogade 15 A. Until April 29.
Thursday to Friday: 12:00-17:30, Saturday: 11:00-15:00.
Closed on Sundays and Mondays.

Thomas Bang, b. 1938, has a distinct formal vocabulary. It is varied yet highly characteristic. His objects come alive thanks to an internal interplay of contrasts—between what is almost identical and what is very different, between the self-sufficient and the fragmented, between what organizes itself and what opposes, and between what is open and what is closed. One remembers his works because they have their own logic. They are quickly overlooked but require time before they are truly seen and reveal themselves. They are unique.

The steel is welded and strong, and the forms are simple: metal axes where claustrophobic interiors are hinted at through small black-bending funnels. The front and back of the boxes are parallel, while the contours alternate between straight and convex. Or the steel forms a frame around cloths—blood-red with soot-stained spots—plaster fragments, or nothing at all.

The formal counterpart of the steel is wood: boards, slats, rods, or black-painted, heavy ball shapes. In "Suitcase Object V," there is a one-eyed black head wedged into a murky fine-grained plate. And suddenly, one finds oneself in a setting reminiscent of the painter De Chirico, which is, understandably, not surprising considering the Italian's influence on Bang in his youth. And De Chirico's metaphysical world of irrational, meaningless things remains a kind of guide to Bang's art. A false motif, like his ever-present chimney or lighthouse encircled by columns, is felt in Bang's cycles.

Often, the wood represents a milder, more painterly element. In "From Place to Place II", a light wooden ladder leans against a steel suitcase. On the rungs are attached lead-colored plaster casts of gnarled branches or leaf sheaths, from which bud-like forms emerge. They question the format and authority of the steel box. The plaster, moreover, can also mimic stone or imitate steel forms.

It is characteristic of Bang to create formal parallels between materials with entirely different properties, radiance, and color. This could be called an attempt at reconciliation between incommensurable dimensions. This also includes precision: blood-red cloths pressed together and tightly stuffed into crevices and cavities or used as bindings, and iridescent copper within strict frames. It is both the perversion of vanity and the vulnerability of the human condition.

Thomas Bang can make his materials speak a language that is both old-fashioned and of the moment, with associations to rockets and grenades, but also to nature, stone, wood, and soft—bleeding—human forms. The objects speak of sensitivity, and some have poetry, though no warmth. He is intellectual, refined, and heartless—like De Chirico. Even if it is not Böcklin, Nietzsche, or Ferrara, the ambivalence of modern existence, crystallized in Bang’s combinations of objects, shares a sense of kinship with theirs.

The exhibition at Galleri Stalke is not as significant as Bang’s presentation at the Ruth Siegel Gallery in New York last year. Among other things, one misses the "Object with Camouflage" from 1987, along with several works seen in the new catalog published by North-Information in connection with the Stalke exhibition.

By Gertrud Købke Sutton/information 18.4.1989

Exotic

Exciting new sculptures

Stalke Gallery. Vesterbrogade 15A. Tues.-Fri. 12-5:30 PM. Sat. 11 AM-3 PM. Until April 29.

There is something typical about how writing about the Danish-American artist Thomas Bang's sculptures is always much harder to comprehend than the sculptures themselves. The catalog foreword for his latest exhibition at Gallery Stalke is no exception. As an example of the linguistic barrier, one could take the artist's own statement: “Workers are information collectors. The tendency toward accumulation is based on creating a confrontation context in which independent components with more or less clearly decipherable associative relationships are deposited.”

One might end up feeling entirely uncertain about his universe because you do not understand the sheer volume or type of words, whose intent presumably is to interpret and explain it all.

But seen from another angle, the words also reveal something about the ambitions and background of sculpture: they are carefully thought-out, i.e., constructive works that only trigger unique feelings of fascination and wonder through the viewer’s interpretation and experience of their peculiar form and material combinations, surprising connections: soft versus hard, shiny versus matte, space versus surface, etc.

To use a bit of terminology, one might say that Bang as an image-maker is "an intellectual, perfectible constructor." He does not strive for effects; he is likely fishing for meaning, but not for popularity. His works are not slaves to the possibility of being immediately and painlessly understood. In fact, his efforts resemble very little else in this country. One explanation lies in his roots in quite a different environment: the American art and university scene.

In his way, he is both more advanced and more isolated. It is like experiencing an exotic bird near City Hall Square.

If one may be allowed to use somewhat banal expressions like exciting, intriguing, and compositionally beautiful, that is what his new sculptures are. They shoot past the core of modern sculpture as opposed to many other works in the same vein. They blend lush imagination in the choice of materials with a strong will to organize the entire form. And their combination of structures is straightforward yet suggestive. They do not let the viewer go, perhaps because language struggles to penetrate into them.

See them before you read about them. And perhaps do not read about them until you have seen them.

Peter M. Hornung

Sculpture That Provokes Thought

Thomas Bang is back from the USA with a series of challenging sculptures.

It’s not only because you leave the hectic life of Vesterbrogade and step into the cool, white tranquility of Galleri Stalke's courtyard that you feel transported to a foreign world.

It’s also because Thomas Bang’s sculptures are a world unto themselves. Despite seeming to recognize the parts, it is difficult to derive a cohesive meaning from the very complex forms. They often consist of a container that interacts with the surrounding world when confronted with other forms: a couple of thin rods penetrating the container or formations in iron and plaster extending to the floor.

The container is a recurring motif in Thomas Bang’s work, which he describes with the term “collectors,” meaning a form that partly protects its contents and partly conceals it. In several “collector” forms, there is a funnel indicating possible exchange between the inner and outer spaces. In “Object for Survival” from 1988, this funnel is turned inward, so that communication must emerge from within the sculpture, whose bleak futuristic perspective is a tank-like container with a sword-like, aggressive surface.

Shared Space

By not placing his sculptures on pedestals, Thomas Bang emphasizes that sculpture should always be experienced as a relationship between bodies in space. Instead of elevating the sculpture on a pedestal, at a level away from the observer, it is placed so that the sculpture and observer share the same space. This realization is something he has borrowed from minimalism, but he is not interested in the revolutionary upheaval that minimalism demands of the viewer. Instead, he wishes for the viewer to transform into a collaborative participant, producing meaning from the elements of the sculpture.

Therefore, the parts of the sculptures are what one might call “near-forms”—forms that resemble something recognizable. Not to seek out some Jungian archetype, but because the forms reference a shared linguistic universe of shapes, from which we have common physical experiences.

In this method of working, Thomas Bang aligns with a number of American and European artists who, in the 1970s, developed individual mythologies by allowing the same symbols to appear again and again in their artworks. This forces the observer to rethink the shifts in meaning each time a symbol is placed in new contexts, rather than—like in traditional sculpture—recognizing a motif or a clear meaning.

The Known Things
In continuation of this approach, Thomas Bang further incorporates the practice of meaning-making from modernism, referring to his sculptures and reliefs as “objects.” By doing so, he wishes to highlight the use of everyday objects in artworks. An object doesn’t depict something else; it is something we recognize. The aesthetic challenge becomes experiencing “life” as art, and vice versa, in the modernist sense of self-awareness.

But Thomas Bang has long since moved beyond that. In his large series “From Place to Place” and “Collect and Hold,” he draws on both the traditional meaning-structure of sculpture and modernism.

It is evident that Thomas Bang (born 1938), who resides in the USA and has exhibited regularly in New York since 1970, must be highly precise in his work due to the fierce competition to convey his message. It is this precision in expression that is his strength.

Galleri Stalke, “from place to place...”, sculptures by Thomas Bang. Vesterbrogade 15, Copenhagen V. Until April 29.

By Peter S. Meyer

Kristlig Dagblad 6.4.1989

The Object and Its Challenge

Thomas Bang challenges with a fascinating exhibition in Copenhagen of a mosaic-like fragmented world.

Floor and wall objects by Thomas Bang

(Stalke Gallery, Copenhagen, until April 29)

Thomas Bang's objects belong to the category that stands enigmatic before you, because they are, in a way, difficult to put into words. On the one hand, they possess a self-evident presence in their being.

There is a larger exhibition of his latest works, displayed in the Stalke Gallery, featuring both floor and wall objects. There is actually quite a variety in their design. However, they are united by an overarching tone and atmosphere, which, among other things, emerges from the consistent use of the dark elegance of metal elements, which is repeated.

His objects invite exploration. They allure with their funnels, painted in strong red or blue on the inside. You think there is something to it. It is something of a mental nature, which draws threads to earlier works’ cultural elements. The simple constructions, which are also included, reference a diversity of experiential modes — from cultural elements rooted in ritual to the everyday, where the logic is lost and thus a sense of emptiness sets in.

Some of the objects especially have a symbolic character, where it remains unclear exactly what they refer to — a rocket about to launch, or a symbol of something destructive. This object has a funnel on the concave side, which is countered by an aggressive convex side.

In other ways, the hard metal forms create a dialogue with opposites, e.g., with a painted, organic wooden surface. There is no straightforward symbolism, but the balance balances on a knife-edge between the plausible and the implausible, between culture and technology, and an almost utopian reconciliation.

The objects remain standing as fleeting, fragmentary statements about the interaction between what one might call the material and the spiritual.

Still, Thomas Bang suggests with his objects a mosaic-like fragmented world. In his objects, complexity and diversity become united with an evident simplicity on both walls and floors, in small and large objects.

A fascinating exhibition, where the objects also as sculptural forms require different approaches to grasp them. Some invite a slow approach and invite you to walk around them, while others are starkly frontal and yet demand to be seen from a bird’s-eye perspective. Nor is Thomas Bang unambiguous in his works’ physical presence. He challenges.

Ann L. Sørensen

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