Linn Lühn is delighted to announce Florian Baudrexel’s new exhibition of eleven small-format, polygonal relief sculptures under the title Cardbirds. Mounted in square Plexiglas boxes, the sculptures articulate their own distilled formal language. Their overlapping surfaces form levels, cascades, and edges. The individual elements are concentrated with suggested movements, like a barely perceptible echo of modernist architecture, and the compositional complexes combine to form dynamic centers. The raw haptic qualities of their edges and corners make them almost tangible and create a volume that, like the direct result of a constant change in the surfaces, lends them an immediate and tactile impression.

Made from colored cardboard boxes, Baudrexel’s Cardbirds also visualize the moment of finding a form—and with it the immersion in a previously unconscious world. It is a world composed of spaces that are hidden behind the edges and breaks of their innumerable constituent parts and allow our eyes to explore the soft colors of their material like an expansive landscape. Their contours, which result from the found abstract and architectural elements of the cardboard boxes, as well as from the materiality of their breaks, are layered to form new architectures. They clearly outline the model-like figures that Baudrexel developed in the open interplay of their internal and external form and simultaneously visualize the facets of their process-based development: the sketch-like capturing of a formal idea, the multitude of their components, which initially unfolded on the table and pinboard, and at the same time the freedom of a playful moment. This occurs unexpectedly and easily amid everyday life and concentrated in a silent dialogue in which their forms and structures are both an offer and an invitation to enrich them with our associations and impressions. Like the forms, new spaces open up in them—and in them an exchange about the fragility of beauty in the lightness of a specially created world.

Philipp Fernandes do Brito