Marten Schech's artistic works are characterised in a special way by architectural structures as well as natural materials and building materials. A dedicated architectural reference is the starting point of his artistic work. The sculptor, who at the same time can draw on a background and well-founded experience in the preservation of historical monuments, not only creates handy house models, hybrid objects and site-specific settings, but also builds houses himself that can actually be walked on, including all the work steps.
Building brackets or supporting scaffolding, which only suggest their static help and necessity within an exhibition space as a site-specific intervention, stand in Marten Schech's work next to completely real, small half-timbered houses that are newly built on a meadow or a wall.
Marten Schech's built sculptures and objects take up the structure of the half-timbered house as a form of scaffolding. Through this, the statics of a house can be experienced and the functions of durability, safety and protection of a dwelling are reflected. At the same time, his sculptures can be correctly located in terms of building history and classified in terms of time, which he charmingly combines here and there with small, precisely placed deviations, creating a special tension.
The principle of recycling materials fundamentally shapes Marten Schech's approach. He uses wood and building materials that have already been temporarily used again and again for new works. The concept of the "evolved house", which in heritage conservation describes the different temporal levels that overlapped and complemented each other in buildings in earlier centuries, is explored by Marten Schech in his artistic works in a multi-layered way.
In his series "Chamaechorie" in particular, Marten Schech interlocks organically growing structures with architectural constructions to create hybrid sculptural objects. Built by hand in amorphous half-timbered structures, these works on the one hand feature the construction method of a half-timbered house and on the other hand are based on organic structures reminiscent of plant seeds. The titular principle of chamaechory as a strategy of plants to spread by the wind is characterised by a lack of location. Such plants, which often move as rolling spheres, are found especially on the steppes. The so-called "true rose of Jericho" is perhaps best known in this country as chamaechory.
The organic, mobile structures of the chamaechorie, which are not bound to a specific location, represent an exciting contrast to today's common notions of architecture and are combined by Marten Schech in a special hybrid form to create sculptural shapes. And yet old inner cities in particular have an organically evolved structure, just as older houses have often grown over time through additions, extensions and conversions and are subject to change.
The special design of Marten Schech's artistic works goes hand in hand with a special colour scheme for his sculptural objects, installations and spatial interventions. The colour design of his artistic objects is based on the historical colour schemes of half-timbered buildings. The titles of the individual works always refer to an existing house in the respective location, which was the inspiration for the specific sculpture. The graphic colour scheme, which we are used to seeing primarily in half-timbered houses today, represents a black-and-white contrast between dark supporting beams and whitewashed infill panels. However, yellow supporting beams, pink and light blue structures can also be found in Schech's works and their architectural models, which are historically classified as baroque colour schemes. The exactness of the conception of Marten Schech's artistic work, which takes into account a wide variety of backgrounds and is precisely thought out and historically grounded in both form and colour design, in order to create very individual aesthetic settings from them, represents the special strength of his œuvre to date.
Often oscillating between real architecture as a walk-in sculpture and a kind of model character, since the houses are at the same time - by today's standards - quite small, Marten Schech always plays with emotional attributions that the built space and artistic objects are able to trigger in recipients. Thus, architectural structures immediately evoke questions of potential use and dreams of living space that concern individual as well as socio-political aspects of lifestyle.
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