Susanne Rottenbacher

Life and work

Rottenbacher was born in Gottingen and is now based in Berlin. The artist enrolled at Columbia University, Barnard College, New York, in 1988. After graduating in 1991 (B.A., scenography / theatre) she attended the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning in London to study light and lighting design (M.Sc.,1992).

Rottenbacher creates spacious installations assembled from individual sculptural elements best to be described as light-colour corpuses. They are made of perspex constructs equipped on their inside with LED lights and painted on their outside with dynamic stripe-patterns. Suspended from the ceiling by strands of wire, the sculptures seem to be floating in space. Others are placed on the ground, either free standing or simply laid down. Truncated forms seem to merge into the architecture, apparently progressing into walls and floors. All such elements may be presented individually or pooled to form larger ensembles that function as site-specific intenventions.

In Rottenbacher's sculptures, the coloured light firstly correlates with the stripe-painting and the form of the perspex corpus. It then als interacts vividly with the specific light dynamic of the surrounding space creating a form of a continuous dialogue. Given a strong surrounding light, colour and form seem to be very much focussed on the sculpture´s specific form. With decreasing daylight, the work increasingly radiates into the space in an occupying manner. Changing daylight allows for a spectacle of great poetic power to occur, showcasing the sculpture as its bright and shining "hero".

Although she creates massive sculptural bodies and spacious installations, Rottenbacher's sculptures are generally characterized by particular lightness and transparency. Often enough these playfully enter into an exciting and ironic tribute playing dialogue with the works of some of the most prolific sculptors of the 20th century. (text: Rafael von Uslar)