Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Tiergarten

Esther Schipper

Perfect Society

Roman Ondak

13. September – 26. Oktober 2019

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Roman Ondak’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Entitled Perfect Society, the exhibition includes new sculptures, a painting, and works on paper.

A major theme in Ondak’s oeuvre, most of the works take as point of departure found objects-be they utilitarian or everyday, from the world of construction, athletic equipment, art and design, or mass-produced ephemera. Slight alterations, added modifications, and/or precise restructuring of elements create works of art that, while playing on echoes of its original shape, function or state, exude a simple, classical sense of beauty and rhythm.

Organized to create a delicate looking convex surface rising from the ground, the large-scale sculpture, Perfect Society, 2019, is assembled from several thousand short pieces of heating, water and gas pipe of varying diameter. Its central circular shape, around which curved parts of pipe are loosely placed, at first resembles the characteristic orderly structure of a sunflower’s blossom or a hive’s honeycomb. The motif of bees and flower is a metaphor for energy: both for the warmth generated by a beehive and the sun and as a model of social interaction in which each part is contributing to the good of the whole. Arranged by decreasing diameter from the center to its margins, leaving the bent parts at its periphery, the repurposed pipes (salvaged from a public building near the artists‘ studio) come to symbolize hierarchical order and uniformity and, as the title suggests, stipulate an analogy with utopia.