David Nash

As part of “Blickachsen 8 RheinMain” various works by David Nash – offering an insight into the range of his creative output – are on display in the main church and in front of the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt. For Nash a dialogue with nature is always the starting point for his designs. He works mainly with wood, and even his bronze and iron casts are developed out of work in wood. He uses wood that is either dead or already felled. The point of departure is always a consideration of their particular quality – their structure, their age and colour, their plasticity, their resistance to being worked, and their vulnerabilities. Using a chain-saw or simple tools he elicits from the wood its intrinsic inner structures, incorporating the on-going metamorphosis of the natural material into his work. From massive tree trunks Nash liberates not only the basic geometric forms of cube, sphere or pyramid, but also archetypes such as a boat, throne or cross, and natural forms such as an egg, a spiral or a seed. Through serial structural incisions he fans out a massive block of wood like a concertina, or transforms heavy tree trunks into filigree columns or egg shapes, turning in spirals, as if covered in scales or seemingly rolled-up. David Nash became well-known above all for his works in which the wood surface is either wholly or partly charred. Here also, the principle of metamorphosis is carried over into his art: through the charring Nash precipitates a transition of the material from the organic into the mineral. The charred form seems condensed; one’s attention is directed away from the material, towards its shape. In the city church of Darmstadt four impressive examples of Nash’s method of working are on display: “Crack and Warp Column”, “Red and Black Dome”, “Red Throne” and “Stack”. Under the late-Gothic ribbed vault of the choir of the church and in the historic tower hall, Nash’s sculptures enter into a tense dialogue with the ensemble of statues in the church – particularly with the dominating epitaph, erected by Landgrave George I in 1587 for his late wife Magdalena, and which shows the couple life-size. As one of the most important contemporary British sculptors, David Nash was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1999. A major retrospective of his works was held in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2010-11. Nash, whose work is on display in leading museums around the world, has since 1967 lived and worked in North Wales, where his characteristic single sculptures on the one hand, and also his nature installations and landscape projects are created, exposed to the effects of weather or subject to the natural process of growth. In these works, ageing over the years, the artist sets in motion a process determined and ultimately completed by nature, thus conflating artistic creative will with the elementary power of nature. Nash’s works have already been exhibited in three previous “Blickachsen” exhibitions. Two recent open-space sculptures by Nash are now on display in front of the Kunsthalle Darmstadt. In his “Chinese Iron Dome” and “Three Butts” Nash plays with the fundamental opposition of nature and construct, organic growth and architecture. The three lying tree stumps, “Butts”, seem like fallen column shafts, recalling an enormous ruined temple of antiquity. They perhaps bring to mind also the famous theorist of classical architecture Vitruvius, for whom the “primaeval hut” made of tree trunks and branches was the genesis of human architecture, indeed of civilization. The trunks lie on black pieces of lumber, shaped like railway sleepers. With these “pedestals” also, Nash plays nature against human artefacts. At the same time, the “Three Butts” signal that nature, without any creative working of it, is already a work of art, a monument. In “Chinese Irons” Nash goes in the opposite direction: here the iron cast, as man-made material, imitates natural forms, rocks. The circle of bizarre pillars recalls once more sacred architecture, round temples, perhaps prehistoric places of worship. Thus out of simple elements Nash creates a complex play of nature, art and spiritual meaning. The works in front of the Kunsthalle generate memorable “Blickachsen” – visual axes – in two ways: They respond with their biomorphic design to the clear geometry of the Bauhausinspired building, and they build a bridge to the exhibition of works by Eberhard Schlotter, also dedicated precisely to the fundamental symbolic language of architecture.