Markus Schaller
German, born 1967Managed Cube, 2005
On view
Steel
Dimensions80 × 79 × 68 in. (203.2 × 200.7 × 172.7 cm)
Museum purchase with funds from the Collection Endowment and the Hurand Sculpture Courtyard Fund, 2013.65
Markus Schaller is a German artist who studied at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1988. At a time when many artists were experimenting with video and computer art, Schaller was interested in working with forged metal. Although the tools have become more modern, the basic practice of forging, which has its roots in the ancient period, has remained the same. Forging is the process of forming and shaping metals through the use of hammering, pressing, or rolling.
As you walk around the sculpture it morphs into different shapes: from one angle it looks like a pyramid, and from another it looks like a cube. This interaction between sculpture and viewer, one that constantly changes, was important to the artist. It is not just the intentionally rusted metal that makes an impact; many of Schaller’s sculptures have stamped words or letters in unexpected locations. In Managed Cube you can see a series of eight words in German at the end of each rectangle. The top row creates the sentence; “ It fills up the time,” and each subsequent line is a variation of that phrase. Literature and poetry have always fascinated Schaller; but beyond that, these words remind us that there are many ways to articulate our world—through form, texture, scale, as well as text.
