Kunstverein Freiburg is pleased to announce its autumn season with two parallel exhibitions with works by the artists Sean Edwards (1980 in Cardiff, Wales, UK) and John Divola (1949 in Los Angeles, US). The ground floor entrance hall shows an extensive site-specific installation by Sean Edwards. It is the first institutional exhibition outside of the UK for the artist who lives in Abergavenny, Wales. On the surrounding first-floor gallery, a selection from two series of photographs by John Divola is being shown. These works of the established American photographer are being displayed in Germany for the first time.

The installations of Sean Edwards often have a sculptural appearance of craftsmanship in their material emphasis, creating a dynamic coexistence of neutral spaces and art spaces, of immediate awareness and fleeting references of personal memory as well as pop-cultural images. Invariably assuming the experience of a work of art in the present, his work emphasizes their encompassment of other times and places. For Freiburg, the artist has created ‘Resting Through’, a chest-high shelf structure consisting of regular elements, which is open on both sides. Built from untreated plywood with a rough surface, it spans through the whole 32 metres long axis of the ground floor exhibition space as a closing barrier as well as a functional element.

Typical for Edwards is his use of the sculptural intervention as a medium to direct the viewer in the space, as if leading through an unfolding narration. The shelf structure divides the main hall of the Kunstverein radically in two halves and forces visitors to walk alongside it: from one half of the space over the stairs to the first floor and back down the stairs on the other side and into the other half of the whole hall. It also serves as a rack for small, handworked sculptural objects, throwaway found objects and cuttings from books and newspapers. The shelf structure appears as a gigantic sill or grandiose plinth for the objects placed upon it, claiming to be a work in its own right. The separation of the space becomes an emblem for the ability of any object or artifact to polarize meaning and interpretation. On the one hand this is a work of art, on the other hand it is also a piece of furniture.