Emilia Neumann and Urban Hüter:
The Sisyphean mode as an artistic concept

Never reaching the goal and thus futile: “Sisyphean labor” is the proverbial term for the frustration that comes with pointless hard work, effort that must recommence time and again, inevitably repeated, the situation irresolvable.
In their joint exhibition Sisyphean Mode, Emilia Neumann and Urban Hüter examine precisely that moment of frustration but offer a different interpretation that runs counter to it: They explore the Sisyphean mode as an artistic concept that sees repetition as a strategy for initiating automatisms in art; automatisms that defy conceptual pre-calculation and are so artistically exciting precisely as a result.

The power of repetition
From an art-historical perspective, this process of working in series has long been familiar: Claude Monet painted more than sets 300 water lilies – according to traditional interpretation, it was this that gave rise to the school of vision leading to non-figurative art that the Modernist pioneered as his sight failed him. Piet Mondrian’s path away from figuration began with landscape painting: trees that appear again and again and leave their very substance behind step by step through their development as series. In the repetition, the expressive independence of the subject carves its way until it completely leaves its substance behind.
For Sisyphean Mode, the sculptors Emilia Neumann and Urban Hüter consciously base their respective practices on a concept of work series that is closely linked to the creative process. In terms of their aesthetic impact, however, each of the works exists in its own right. Series by Urban Hüter, such as the Vases I-IV (2021) or even the series of large-format wall-mounted objects (Virgin Honey, 2021, or nudybranche, 2019), are actually families of sculptures. Similar to one another in format and principle, the objects are nevertheless each highly individual with their own unique characteristics. Emilia Neumann also uses seriality with regard to form. Once she has begun, she works on the circular wall-mounted objects (Untitled (I-VI) 2015–20) serially or at least several times. These different methods of serial work enable both artists to explore an artistic principle whose potential emerges in the ongoing repetition of an action. Principle and concept withdraw, and the creative process becomes automated in formal abstraction. For the artists Neumann and Hüter, within the act of repetition, the Sisyphean mode, lies a constructive moment of crativity rather than laborious ceaselessness. This is precisely the moment when the works of both sculptors reveal their potential in entirely different ways. Yet the dissolution of the representational reference is not the principle here. Rather, what they have in common is the display of the process itself and a clear commitment to its indissolubility.

The potential of indissolubility
Copper, metal, plastic: Urban Hüter often finds his materials in junk yards, collects everyday objects, and incorporates them into a process of transformation. Among the families of figures in the exhibition space, there is nothing that is reminiscent of their urban-industrial origins. At first, it is the reference to nature that seems stronger: Like big, iridescent insects or monstrous creatures, the figures slowly come to life, find their way, stretch their antennae, and extend their limbs. Sometimes, motorized by the artist, they spin eerily in the space. Only in the next moment do the soldered metals, hammered sheets, rivets, screws, and scuffed surfaces become visible. Clearly hand-crafted collages and man-made materials from industry and everyday life suddenly reveal their composite construction, their made-ness. The life within them recedes as quickly as it came, feelers become hoses or braided copper wires again before their transformation begins anew. It is in this back and forth, which is indeed enhanced precisely by the serial repetition and the gathering together of groups of works, that their transformation arises, and it is in their transformation that the artistic core is rooted. Never merely abstract object, never merely an imitating figure – the sculptures by Urban Hüter seek their moment of organic genesis precisely when they are recognized as aesthetic constructions.
Emilia Neumann’s works likewise make their own creation visible and put this process on display. Like Hüter, the artist collects parts of objects, or at least concrete things that are part of our everyday lives: rubber mats, terracotta vases, or satellite dishes. Neumann’s interest lies in their formal language, and so, like a forensic scientist examining the present, she makes impressions using plaster, plastic, silicone, or even concrete. She puts these impressions of our environment together to create sculptural assemblages, twists them, and sometimes even uses the negative form, i.e. the outer or reverse side. The result is new and independent sculptures – sometimes we might think we recognize the things from which they originated. Yet whenever the decoding process seems to have been completed, the sense of the object is twisted again. The artistic potential arises anew in the back and forth of the sculpturally solidified process of abstraction between depiction and alienation.

Color as a bearer of meaning
Coloration plays an important role in the indissolubility of the process of creating the objects that are Neumann’s sculptures. The pigments are stirred directly into the liquid plaster or concrete before the mass is poured into the mold. The result is completely unpredictable, as the color progresses uncontrollably and is thrown to the surface by the pouring motion. The result is fragile, pastel-like pigment landscapes ranging from elder green to rust pink. The self-referential rendering of the carrier material supports the autonomy of the sculptures and in turn opens up the viewer’s own associative spaces.
The works on paper, such as the series hills and bodies (2019), are even greater testament to this painterly process of abstraction. Without the object-like dimension, the formal model of our everyday world, the color itself becomes the object. The creative process that underpins it remains sculptural here, as is characteristic for Neumann. The artist mixes the color pigments in a basin with various substances such as baking soda, alum, or different oils. She then places the papers, which are always large in size, in the basin, which she sets in a circular motion with the help of her body. The liquids, which are now also circulating, spill onto the white surface and seek out their forms and color constellations – which are then rhythmically controlled and yet stand alone.
In contrast to Neumann, who alienates the material origin of her sculptures and gives them autonomy through color pigments, Urban Hüter initially appropriates the often dominant color characteristics of the found materials: black and yellow striped, dotted, flat orange – shiny silver, copper-colored, reflective, or matt black. From these he composes figurative assemblies that imitate natural beings to varying degrees, initially using the existing material properties to do so. At the same time, however, Hüter also manipulates individual fragments of figures through chemical processes. The copper-plated metal tendrils that wrap around the vases, for example, get their color, their shine, or indeed their matte surface through their processing in an acid bath, where they are electrified. It is precisely through the artistically controlled chemical processes that natural phenomena are imitated: the metallic oscillating green-black gradients of an insect or the jagged surface of a fossilized coral. The whole mysterious palette of our planetary environment is revealed. The enigmatic interplay between natural image and self-referential object is further intensified by the interaction of industrial material colors and organic-alchemical gradients and structures. Just as the natural illusion is gaining strength, a scratched metal surface or an old-fashioned flower vase throws us back to the manufactured nature and composition of the material collages.
The goal as a fallacy
So back to Sisyphus: The famous depictions by Titian (1548–9) or Franz von Stuck (1920) show Sisyphus struggling to roll a boulder up a mountain. The hopelessness of an act of strength seems to be the main subject here. Yet it is above all the male body that stands out, bursting with strength, the muscular back dramatically staged with strong contrasts of light and dark. In this design, the beauty of the act of strength is emphasized in a way that could also be described by way of its self-referential nature: Here, painting itself undoubtedly becomes the subject.
Each in their own way, the sculptors Emilia Neumann and Urban Hüter both place processuality at the center of their self-referential concept of the work. Starting from serial groups of works, the indissolubility, the incompleteness of the unraveling of each individual sculpture forms the basis. Neumann and Hüter’s interpretation does not aim to place the heavy stone at the top of the mountain. Rather, for them the potential lies in each repetition of the act of strength, in the indissolubility of a process. This by no means causes their works to remain in a state of being designed – instead, they propose the Sisyphean mode as an artistic concept.
Since no later than Albert Camus’ 1942 essay on the myth of Sisyphus, happiness has lain in that continuing and doing. After all, isn’t reaching a goal a human fallacy? For Emilia Neumann and Urban Hüter, the essence of their art is rooted precisely in this indissolubility of the process: in the back and forth of materiality and abstraction, in the forming and shaping, in the doing. So that would be it: the Sisyphean mode as an artistic concept.