Berlin | ArtRegion: Berlin, Mitte

Nagel Draxler

Pedro Wirz: Verwachsen

14. September – 2. November 2019

«Verwachsen» is Brazilian Swiss artist Pedro Wirz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Nagel Draxler. The title could be translated as «Grow into One Another», and it indicates Wirz’s interest in ecology. The entwining it describes accounts for both human and non-human agents, while also thinking in terms of milieu. Wirz’s primarily sculptural practice is based on associations with forms and materials. He creates eggs and coils and bulbous protrusions with holes in them or mounds and towers and sinuous branches. Writers have commented that the work calls forth a sense of primordial or mystical origins. The artist has responded by offering his biography as a frame of reference, a kind of personal mythology – his upbringing in rural Brazil, the child of a biologist and an agronomist. But Wirz’s vocabulary draws equally from organic matter, consumer culture, contemporary artistic conventions, and experimentation with material. «Verwachsen» features three bodies of work: «Entsprechung I–V» (Correspondence I– V), the wall-mounted assemblages in round-edged, wooden frames, which continue a series begun by the artist earlier this year. The new, standing, glass-steel-and-textile sculptures that Wirz refers to as «Wet Transistors». And the «Heaters», or spheres of styrofoam and soil, each with an electical cord that plugs into the wall.