reiner maria matysik

wesen / being, entity

“ i was concerned as an artist particularly with models of post-evolutionary organisms and my vision of “active” evolution, that is, evolution controlled by humans. my motivation for modelling biological bodies and creating prototypes of future organisms stems from the conviction that the rapid advances in the modern life sciences will have dramatic consequences for the process of biological evolution, as well as for art.

as a non scientific artist-scientist i created organic sculptures and proposed “future lifeforms”. they are made of soft plasticine. the material is used to keep the sculptures changeable all the time. they serve the purpose of a model. scientists and parts of the society are ment to discuss the design of these future lifeforms. the sculptures can only work like this because the material never hardens. thus the process of deciding about strategies and shapes may start whenever life science is advanced enought to make these proposals become real. ”

Reiner Maria Matysik is a Berlin based artist and Professor at the University of Art and Design in Halle (Burg Giebichenstein) for three-dimensional design.
He studied fine arts at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig and at the Ateliers Arnhem. He works in manifold ways with concepts for future landscapes and organisms, like postevolutionary life forms. Through the specific adoption of object, installation and video he developed a dynamic scenario of future landscapes and organisms. In this way he creates an area of conflict between promise and failure in a potential future. Both the visual implementation and their linguistic form can be recognised here as the essential artistic strategies which he uses as his own interface between the worlds of scientific research and pseudo-scientific fiction.

In 2004 he directed the artistic development project Institute of Biological Sculpture at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig. He was a lecturer at the Institute of Visual Arts, Faculty of Architecture, Technical University Braunschweig; 2008–2009 visiting professor of sculpture at the Fachhochschule Kunst Arnstadt. He has exhibited his artworks in institutions such as the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen; Centre Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin; Projektraum deutscher Künstlerbund, laboratoria moskau; Museum Koenig, Bonn; Georg Kolbe Museum and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Fondación Cesar Manrique, Lanzarote; Kunstverein Hannover; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. He is the recipient of grants from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Kunstfonds e.V., DAAD, KfW Bank, Stiftung NORD/LB Öffentliche, and the Berlin Senate.