Sylvia Hagen

Accordingly, the elementary modes of existence of these figures, the bent, the seated, the standing. In Sylvia Hagen's work, they suppress both the metaphorical and the discursive impulse and solidify into posture carriers for the psychological constellations of a figure that now only wants to explain itself within itself. No fountain figures, no caryatids, no monuments, no busts, no iconography in myth and religion, no ideal constructions and symbols of beauty, but rather structural forms of the psyche, twisted, cut, connected and separated contexts of concentration and dissolution, of holding on and letting go, of affirmation and negation give these works something immensely electrifying and at the same time deeply doubtful that immediately reaches the viewer.

The brittleness of the first glance disappears as you look at them. They exude a lively energy that is difficult to describe, and a high-energy field of tension seems to vibrate around these sculptures. I see vulnerability and, at the same time, a very solid assertiveness, emphasised differently from figure to figure. They are constructed from fragments, from clay tablets or glass shards. A peculiar order emerges from the assembled, chaotic fragments. Volumes maintain a fragile balance. Each one appears to be cast from a single mould, and this does not refer to the fact that many of them are cast in bronze or iron, but rather to the wholeness that nevertheless emerges from the openness of the tectonics, from the cracks and fractures in the surfaces. They carry within them the serenity of the unmade, of the become, which wants to be nothing more than it is. And yet they coalesce into forms that astonishingly accurately describe the state of this world and our place in it.