The museum’s collection by Bernhard August von Lindenau is composed of sculptures, Greek in origin, that have been replicated time and time again while hewn initially from marble and painted partially in colour. These originals were then copied repeatedly in marble or plaster in different places over the centuries, in the process being deprived of their colour and slurred in their details.

Despite these multiple re-shapings that attend the loss of the original’s memory, new meanings and frictions arise with each copy in each respective present. They are the precondition for over 2400 years of the ongoing revitalization of the legacy of antiquity. The »fold«, a continually recurring visual and conceptual motif in Seidel’s works is the pictorial metaphor for these layers and distortions of meaning. In the projection the fold becomes connected to the fragmentary sculptures, swirls around them, makes them flow with bygone colours, protects or clothes them, gives them peace and lets them come alive for a moment, in order then to be stored as a further layer in the sediment of oblivion.

[→ Download PDF] Monographic Catalogue »FOLDS ­– Robert Seidel«
Lindenau-Museum Altenburg
Editors: Robert Seidel + Jutta Penndorf
Author: Ulrike Pennewitz, Ingrid Mössinger, Ralf Suermann, Jutta Penndorf
ISBN 978-3-86104-070-0

folds
2-channel video on 19th century plaster casts of Kladeos, Kephissos, Belvedere Torso, Seer and the Three Goddesses from the Bernhard August von Lindenau Collection, HD, variable Loop

Artwork: Robert Seidel
Sound: Heiko Tippelt
Dimension: 7,2 × 1,9 × 2,4 m
Location: Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, Germany
June 18 – August 14, 2011

Part of Focus Young Art. 2011: A regional exhibition programme of the Juergen Ponto Foundation for promotion of Young Artists

Documentation Editor: Falk Müller
Still photography: Jürgen M. Pietsch + Christian Seeling