Wolf von Kries

Wolf von Kries does not limit himself to one medium, but navigates freely between sculptures, installations, video and photography, blurring the lines that exist between works of art and everyday objects. A tireless walker, he likes to explore faraway lands as well as his immediate surroundings, as if the world was a text to decipher. In this aim, he follows a near-scientific approach - collecting objects, observing phenomena, conducting experiments, establishing comparisons.

His work turns the ordinary into the extraordinary through a specific process that is both material and mysteriously poetic. Nothing is wasted, nothing is created, but everything is transformed and reconfigured. Von Kries uses existing objects and situations - such as a molten bit of concrete, the concentric circles left by the rain on the pavement, the creaking doors of his childhood – then alters them in order to create unexpected scenarios. With very limited means, he unveils fortuitous encounters, hidden meanings, spatial relations and formal correspondence. All these random and unorthodox connections are to be discovered or extended by the audience.

For the Ferme du Buisson, the artist makes use of the history of the place and its links with the Menier industrial empire as a prism through which to investigate the concepts of value and progress. Seemingly trivial objects are his starting point, from which he imagines utopian models, such as a giant inner tube covered with a starry constellation of repair patches, a geodesic structure ma de of daily papers, a mirrored pyramid of sugar lumps, a collection of food cans from all over the world with identical expiry dates, etc. The exhibition therefore indirectly evokes the current economic situation, while developing an intentional poetry of the makeshift and the amateurish as a way to create parallel universes.