Restored Spalls: Unfolding While Falling: KATJA STRUNZ
Nathalie Karg is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Berlin-based artist Katja Strunz. Restored Spalls: Unfolding While Falling is Strunz’s first solo-exhibition with the gallery.
Falling and folding are integral to the work of Berlin-based artist Katja Strunz. As in the English language, the German word Fall denotes vertical movement, often suggesting chance, but in German it also describes an event or case, and builds compounds, so that an Einfall can be an idea that falls upon you or possibly even an invasion. In this way, Fall entails coincidence but also precision, it transgresses boundaries. To fold (falten) is to generate forms, it can bring points together and produce entanglement. For Strunz, it is a horizontal movement, without directional or temporal limitation—potentially infinite.
Materiality and process are key in this falling and folding, as moments are Told, Untold, Retold. By deconstructing found materials, from the pages of books to repurposed metals, Strunz opens herself to their energy, explores the resistance they offer, and remains alert to the new. In the process, values and histories are produced, changed, and re-presented—there are no blank slates.
In Restored Spalls, past materialities fall into the present and are experienced as an intensity, an Einfall, where folding and entangling revisit shadows of the cultural subconscious. It’s invasion as invitation: the specter of historical constructivism enters, its ghosts still active. Through this process, time becomes visible and specters live on, with hints of Malevich’s forms in space haunting her collages, several of which also nod to saturated Bauhaus hues, while the combination of angular and curved forms meeting in Spatial Infusion (2023) brings to mind the tension of Lissitzky’s famous poster.
Through the fall and the fold, Strunz’s works evoke the endless and particular, manifesting possibilities that are both ongoing and precise. These potentialities are on striking display in Transformation (2022), where powder-coated steel forms suggest agency. Able to be unfolded and enfolded, they are precisely poised between expansion and contraction. It’s a powerful statement, where a frozen moment fans out, implying decisions that hint at relationships with the present, with past trauma, and with future healing.
Strunz has long worked with splintered and fractured triangular forms, colliding fragments together—both collaged on the page and held within the container of the gallery space. This practice reflects her interest in Walter Benjamin’s literary montage, where precise fragments open to a wider wholeness. Yet these are not linear histories selling a myth of progress; here we see the tension in actively attempting to apprehend the whole, yet perceiving only fragments. Just as past trauma re-actualizes, these spalls or splinters break apart and come together, materializing the space between indeterminacy and entanglement, suggesting possible restoration.
