Achim Bitter
07.03. – 18.04.2004

Exhibitions featuring artists from the region have a long tradition at the Kunsthalle. Examples include the exhibitions by Horst Müller in 1992, Norbert Schwontkowski in 1993, Andrée Korpys and Markus Löffler in 1995, Wolfgang Michael in 1996, and Achim Bertenburg in 1997. With Achim Bitter, born in Twistringen in 1960 and currently living in Bremen, the Kunstverein is presenting another artist from the region whose work was shown in 2000 in the exhibition “ein/räumen. Arbeiten im Museum” (ein/räumen. Works in the Museum) at the Kunsthalle Hamburg, among other places.

Cardboard boxes are piled on top of cardboard boxes. Above them is an upturned chair with bandages wrapped around it. Next to it is an upright slatted frame that shields a constellation of shelves, a refrigerator, and a telephone, which in turn culminates in an ironically rosy children’s bathtub. The eye searches further and discovers shoe boxes, pillows, coolers, carpet remnants, and office chairs next to and behind it, stacked on top of each other, stuck together, laid down, placed, arranged, left lying around, forgotten? You never know for sure when you encounter Achim Bitters’ work. How this comes about is one of the questions that preoccupies the artist intensely. Even though most of the constellations that Bitter creates from bulky waste and the mundane realm of our domestic world of goods and objects appear at first glance to be products of chance, they are in fact often arrangements that have been carefully planned over weeks and developed with meticulous attention to detail, each one different from the last.

The task that the artist sets himself is particularly complicated because it aims at the greatest possible mutual interpenetration of intention and unintentionality. The most perfect construction is therefore one that does not reveal itself as such at all. … In the principle of layering and adding, of taking away and removing boxes, furniture, and household appliances, Bitter varies the centuries-old basic axioms of sculpture and links them to questions of architectural sociology. The experience of the city as a space for action, the interpenetration of outside and inside, public and private, and, last but not least, moments of recycling and the associated transformation and reuse of materials commonly considered superfluous play an important role in Bitter’s artistic thinking.

Stephan Berg, from: Archisculptures, Kunstverein Hannover 2001

Curated by Jürgen Wesseler.