Heinz Ohff: Flight and Space
Christian Hasucha at the Forum of Contemporary Art

Ever since Panamarenko traced man's dream of flying back to its starting point, Lilienthal, the Wright brothers, young artists, it seems, have been seized with great regret. That master Goethe's "Ah, to the spirit's wing . . ." has so quickly become obsolete through the addition of a physical wing, is gladly and largely ignored.

Skepticism about engineering technology, especially with regard to flying, was already expressed in the first exhibition of Uta Boutemard's Forum of Contemporary Art. Fritz Gilow's "Flight over Florence. This is also a theme for Christian Hasucha, admittedly only one among many. The Berlin-born artist, born in 1955, master student under Kügler at our HdK, juxtaposes a balloon object, with basket, ballast and lines (which can be "adjusted" in two phases), with three large canvases on which he varies a flight pattern map of birds of prey and song birds in white and black, both almost monochrome, adding the respective Latin or German names. This is somewhat reminiscent of the way Laszlo Lakner deals with found objects from books or textbooks: transformation through alteration, all the more so because Hasucha likes to bundle his drawings into book objects.

The drawings are probably the most beautiful thing in this first solo exhibition, small, intimate, diary-like, he spreads out a hundred of them, made between 1.6. and 30.9.1979, on a giant wheel-like unfolding machine that you can operate yourself - the sheets pass by in flight, as it were, notes that all have to do with space and the problems it confronts people - not just painters.

On the wall hang a number of room designs that were created with the aid of sealing wax, just as the young artist is fascinated by certain materials and builds entire material objects out of this fascination. One can be found in the basement room of the gallery, a cube surrounded by spotlights, drawings, plasterboard, which expands and shrinks again through a heat mechanism, everything blackened with graphite, cube, cubic drawing behind it and plasterboard - the space is surrounded and held together by the graphite, as it were. The path clearly leads from painting and drawing to the relief-like object and consistently further into the environmental art.
H.O.

(Forum aktuelle Kunst, Uta Boutemard, Saarstrasse 7, through early October, Tuesday through Sunday 1-7:30 p.m.. Free admission).