Winter/Hörbelt

by Daniel Birnbaum, Berthold Horbelt (Artist), Florian Matzner (Editor)

Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt use plastic bottle-crates as their main structural material, transforming a banal, familiar and generally neglected item of our commercial and transportation landscape into a versatile building block. Their "box houses" can be found throughout the world: plastic public seating areas await loiterers in the parks and city streets of Hokkaido, Freiburg, Liverpool, Frankfurt, New York State and Houston; a plastic lighthouse stands bright on a rock island in Sweden; and plastic pavilions provide information access and rest/reading rooms at exhibitions like "Skulptur: Projekte in Mnster" and the 1999 Venice Biennale. But Winter and H rbelt's oeuvre is not just boxes. The artists have created useful, breathable structures from metal mesh (the gratings used for scraping dirty shoes), building a ticket booth in the Hamburger Kunsthalle; and their humorous cast objects and play structures provide some of the most accessible, pleasurable, creative explorations of sculpture today.

200 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2002