Light Without Shadow
AWST & WALTHER
110 New Bond Street
The collaboration of Welsh-German artists Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther has over the past four years resulted in sculpture, drawings, installations and performances that seek to fuse the particular with the universal.
Their backgrounds in architecture and theatre are evident in their treatment of the relationship between human beings and their physical and social environments. Their work is simultaneously subtle and confrontational, asking the audience to scrutinise and reassess their received understanding of society's governing values and codes of behavior.
The collaboration has consistently sought to probe the equivocal space between interior and exterior, private and public. Fusing a palette of fragile materials – gelatine, ice, gold, glass and feathers – with a determination to investigate rather than perform, the couple present a material language and philosophy that draws upon their own personal circumstances to explore broader themes of human behaviour.
The objects and settings that emerge from this process are both unassuming and alluring. Their work eschews didacticism in favour of critical investigation, urging the viewer to engage in the questioning spirit that motivates the work.
