Manfred Pernice at Anton Kern and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Two concurrent exhibitions, involving recent furniturelike sculptures at Anton Kern and small-scale architectural models culled from the last 10 years at Storefront for Art and Architecture, underscored that German Manfred Pernice's combination of sculpture, architecture, design and offbeat poetics is both peculiar and compelling. The first exhibition, titled "Commerzbank," featured seemingly casual sculptures made from particleboard, concrete, wood, tiles, buckets and other items. These low-to-the-ground works loosely resemble generic benches in office lobbies, government buildings or urban plazas, but with a twist: they're not functional, they have eccentric and even fantastical elements, and their willfully half-finished look (for instance, tiles attached haphazardly or streaks of paint that abruptly stop, as if the painter had been fired or forced to flee) conflates future potential and creeping ruination.

Pernice's title is also loaded with evocative wordplay. "Bank" in German means both "bank" and "bench," and indeed Pernice's homemade benches are like idiosyncratic renditions of the generally bland decor found in powerful institutions, including financial ones. Moreover, the "merz" part of the title suggests Dadaist Kurt Schwitters's own sculptural adventures in found urban detritus, initially displayed in his "Merzbau" building in Hannover (which was destroyed in an Allied air raid) and then subsequently reprised in Norway and London. Pernice calls his sculptures Merzbanks, and like Schwitters, he finds surprising sculptural possibilities in materials and forms so familiar and ubiquitous that under normal conditions we would hardly give them a second thought.

In Commerzbank 1 (2004), a bench made from particleboard, painted yellow in parts, sports two boxes; atop one box is a plaster cast of a foot. At first glance, the work is unassuming, but gradually things begin to add up. The boxes suggest important secrets, or perhaps some jack-in-the-box surprise. Gaps near the top offer partial glimpses into a dark interior, while the foot remains a disturbing presence: a dislocated body part, a fragment from antiquity positioned in an unlikely place, or a snippet from a dream. Plateau (Frau Saft), 2004, another large particleboard bench, features a small lamp on top and a garish figurative ceramic sculpture; both lamp and figure undermine the residually modernist look of the bench. All of Pernice's works seem too low, narrow, wide, rickety or ungainly to be real furniture, which gives them a kind of baffling and alien presence.

At Storefront for Art and Architecture, three elongated vitrines, made of Pernice's favored particleboard, housed his small models, and it was fascinating to see the fleet connections made among all sorts of disparate objects. As with most architectural models, these seem plausible, as if they were studies for actual structures, until one realizes how inventive and outlandish they really are. Model houses are made of trash, advertisements enliven the walls of some, stairs lead nowhere, a patio with foliage adheres to the outside of an industrial building, photographs of uniform balconies adorn one wall of another building. Most models seem implicated in potent societal forces, whether via blaring newspaper headlines fastened to the walls, commercial products that come at you from every which way or impending environmental catastrophe. In the meantime, Pernice uses his flotsam to considerable sculptural and poetic effect. While chock full of cultural information, his models seriously investigate classic sculptural issues of volume, proportion, gesture and space.

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