Exhibition Badischer Kunstverein

Tre Archi _ two works with sound
Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (Germany)
16.02. – 07.04.2002 / Opening on Febr. 15, at 7:00 p.m.

On Friday, Febr. 15, at 11:00 a.m.
Andreas Oldörp, born in Lübeck-Travemünde in 1959, studied at the College for Fine Arts in Hamburg and read philosophy at the University of Hamburg. He also spent time on study visits in Paris (1983-84) and China (1989-90). He lives and works in Hamburg.

Coming from object and installation art, Andreas Oldörp has been focusing on the interactions between sound and space since 1985. Since 1988 he has been developing sound installations and sculptures with constant sounds which create complex and spatially variable sound fabrics. Oldörp refrains from using electronic sound producers; he employs organ pipes that are connected by a glass air-tube system or uses “Singing flames” where air columns in glass cylinders are caused to vibrate by gas-powered burners.

With Tre Archi Andreas Oldörp has developed two sound installations for the glass-covered atrium and the vaults of the Badischer Kunstverein the sound contributions of which – as is characteristic for his work – are “natural”, that is, they are not produced electronically.
“Singing flames”, gas flames that produce sounds by burning in glass tubes, create an acoustic architecture in the atrium. The special quality of the “singing flames”, of which Oldörp tunes three for the room, was described by Henry Dunant in the 19th century as “… both sweet, powerful, refined and radiant, round, pure, and full …”.
Visually they accentuate the given space in minimalist-functional fashion, here vertically through the sound sources, but often also horizontally through the connecting pipe systems.

In the vaults, the visitor can expect an installation that seems more musical. Here, Oldörp channels steam through tubes into specially designed organ pipes that can transform very small fluctuations in pressure into sound. The ever-changing sound sequences give rise to associations of improvised jazz and world music, disturbed by memories of chirping birds or distant conversations.
Oldörp describes this area of his artistic research as “long-term random positions”. One of his most recent works of this type called “Gossip” at the Sound Art Forum at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin was honoured by the Association of German Art Critics as the special exhibition of the year 2001.
The catalogue for the exhibition is to be regarded as the third, independent part of the exhibition project: the artist Erik Steinbrecher is producing a book about the works of Andreas Oldörp. Several text contributions by Irina Rajewsky, Wolf Jahn, Markus Steffens, Bettina Reichmuth, and Holger Prante illuminate his work from different perspectives.