Exhibitions / Installations

Daily Bread

Taubert Contemporary, Berlin, DE
From 13 September to 21 December 2024

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Who hasn’t kneaded the insides of fresh bread rolls into balls or small creatures and then eaten these shapes, amazed at the altered taste of the crumb due to the compaction. Axel Lieber has hollowed out four loaves of bread and four rolls to transform this “Daily Bread” (1995/2024) into the rustic pantines of a family.

What is our daily bread? What do we occupy ourselves with? What occasions for action do the materials and objects that surround us give us? When do the objects we handle become subjects that challenge us?

A drawer can be a dwelling. We carefully put laundry in it, and as a child we even put a hamster in it. Axel Lieber twists and turns the drawers, stacks them into a tower, builds in picture frames as windows – and the result is a structure that you immediately want to move into: a model for contemporary “private architecture” (the title of the series).

The building “Light in the Attic” (2022), which is part of this series, opens up perspectives in all directions, with a bright tower room as a place of longing, elevated like a machine for living by Le Corbusier. However, the interior of the tower is a single bright space, a shaft in which a plumb line draws an axis.

A scaffold unfolds like a panorama on the wall, which is part of the “Mein konstruktiver Alltag” series. Axel Lieber has reduced packaging boxes and medicine cartons to their edges and uses their modular structure to create a “House of Pain and Color” (2024).

The exhibition opens with a spatial drawing consisting of suspenders, belts and pearl necklaces. A cheerful “group dynamic” (1999-2024) develops in the interaction between the disembodied lineament, which is tensed in space and spans us, and our bodies.

Everyday processes and sculptural principles are gutting, wrapping, hanging, stacking, modeling, applying, stretching, reducing, superimposing, shaping, layering, laminating, mounting, repairing, recycling or cutting out. The difference between the everyday and the artistic lies in a shift in perspective, in a surprising twist, an alienation, in an unforeseen combination. It is the result of an intervention that leads the material, in which a story is already inscribed, to a new narrative: a poetry of everyday life.

– Nike Bätzner