Übereinander / Stacked

The seven individual elements that make up this sculpture represent the layout of Kempen’s old town. Artist James Reineking divided the map of the city center into seven sections based on the street layout, reproduced the resulting shapes as massive steel plates, and stacked them on top of each other.

As such, the seemingly abstract sculpture has a very real, site-specific basis. The mental work that it encourages is an integral part of the artwork. Viewers automatically try to mentally assign each element to its place the city layout, imagining the forms spread out and then trying to reassemble them.

In this sculpture – as in his other works – the artist succeeds in building a bridge between the concrete, purely geometric sculpture and conceptual art by incorporating the viewer’s intellectual capacity as part of the work.

Further reading: Das Kempener Skulpturenprojekt – neue Kunst in alter Stadt; Ed.: Stadt Kempen, Kempen 1994