On Cornelia Konrads' Work .
Heroic Revolt and Poetic Contradiction

… In the "Piles" sculptures Konrads combines different forming principles in a delightful way: not only calm and motion, but also dissolution and density. This is joined by the contrastive play with gravity and  overcoming it, with reality and simulation, and the exciting encounter between nature and culture: the stone and its formation in the work. In addition: are the stones really flying up into the sky, or are they not perhaps falling down and settling on the pile? Rising or falling— that is the question. Ambivalence is typical for Cornelia Konrads’ work in general. It is her signature. In other works the alternatives are different: walking or running, flying or landing, downfall or victory. But the artist’s works consistently irritate and destabilize a monocausal view of the world and thus call into question the foundations of Aristotelian logic. The laws of identity (a = a) and contradiction (a = non-a) and the excluded middle (tertium non datur) do not prevail here. Rather what Konrads thematicizes in her works are interim states, moments of an irritating and

fascinating indecision. Those states in which Zeno’s paradoxes become reality: the arrow that never reaches its target, Achilles who cannot manage to succeed in overtaking the tortoise.

The Irish writer Flann O’Brien, whom Konrads thinks so highly of, calls these interim states “intermediate places,” and they are not less real than Aristotelian or Newtonian reality. They allow time and space to dwindle. They are like a film still that points backwards and forwards both temporally and spatially, contains past as well as future, and to which has always belonged the whole of the film sequence in its core. In such states journeys in space and time are superfluous. It is not where one is that is decisive, but how one is. Konrads produces her works contrary to the logic of “what the case is”, but always with a small sardonic smile. This also applies to the encounter between her two piles of stones in "Piled up", which took place in 1999. Here, …