Sebastian Scholz
cosmo
image: entry to the exhibition / title and year: a Katzenloch, 2025 / material: pvc curtain, uv-print / dimensions: 258 x 227 x 5 cm
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image: installation view
image: installation view
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: cherry wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: elm wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
image: installation view
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: acacia wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
image: installation view
image: work / title and year: a silhouette, 2025 / material: aluminium / dimensions: 20 x 15 cm
image: work / title and year: a memory, 2025 / material: ceiba and beech plywood, aluminium, acrylic glass, cotton rope, clock weight / dimensions: 60 x 27 x 21 cm
image: work / title and year: a Big Bad Wolf, 2025 / material: aluminium, varnish, beech plywood / dimensions: 60 x 70 cm
image: installation view
image: work / title and year: a silhouette, 2025 / material: aluminium / dimensions: variable dimensions
image: installation view
image: installation view
image: detail of work / title and year: a loop, 2025 / material: birch and ceiba plywood, beech, aluminium profiles, acacia, elm / dimensions: variable dimensions
image: work / title and year: a diagram, 2025 / material: beech plywood, beech / dimensions: 56 x 60 x 35 cm
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: cherry wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: elm wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
image: work / title and year: a wanderer, 2025 / material: acacia wood, acrylic glass, magnets / dimensions: 32 x 18 cm
cosmo marks the first chapter of a three-part exhibition: an assembly of puzzle pieces
that reveal their logic, space, time, and matter, only when considered as a whole. In
this opening chapter each object mirrors another, not through likeness but through
the material echo of its form, as if worlds, planets, and invented universes had
collided in an overcrowded playground. Here a toylike sense of shelter and exposure
coexists, the comfort of miniature environments alongside the disquiet of being
too seen, too close.
Smooth surfaces and tightly choreographed forms amplify a subtle fetishism of
objects, a seduction of precision and excess. Crossing a threshold through a peephole
(or Katzenloch) the viewer enters a space that is cramped yet strangely affirming.
It is where surreal objects that should not belong still reflect one another, proposing
harmony through contradiction, awkwardness, and proximity.
The so-called Big Bad Wolf is a pivotal presence capable of shifting the tone in this
compressed environment. The wolf becomes a cipher for the friction between
instinct and civilization, wildness and danger, yet bound by loyalty. It embodies the
shadowed parts of the self that seek both independence and belonging, the undo-
mesticated and the domesticated simultaneously. Unlike a dog or cat, the Big Bad Wolf
cannot be tamed as it stands for the unknown, a presence that resists control and
familiarity. Throughout human storytelling, it has carried our fears, warnings, and
desires. Capable of mirroring what we do not understand in ourselves.
This is a moment we cannot fully comprehend, yet trespassing becomes a way of
moving through this space. Objects point, redirect, and convert, suggesting pathways
without ever really settling them. A motif that signals transition recurs obsessively
in Scholz’s work: the doorknob. After crossing into this cramped interior, door-
knobs represent the moment before entering or exiting, the pause in which change
is negotiated. Another marker of transition is time, represented by the cuckoo clock
serving as both alarm and the temporal passage within this micro-universe. The clock
evokes rhythm and order, symbolizing routine, and the human desire to organize
and measure life.
A decay-like atmosphere permeates the scene, holes in shelf-like structures, bitten
houses, eroded landscapes, and fallen birds. Within this cosmology, precision,
playfulness, and excess are fraying at the edges. After all, cosmo is only the first part
of three, a conversational opener rather than a conclusion. What follows remains
deliberately unfinished.
Anna Hugo