Model Ideas

The POOL workshop focuses on interdisciplinary practices and involves a wide variety of mediums. Its core is rooted in the ideas of sculpture and painting, as seen in the work of Mathis Altmann and Vittorio Brodmann. The two artists explore techniques for embedding narrative structures, highlighting representational elements while investigating how abstraction can lead to distortion, the grotesque, and the fantastical.

The workshop draws attention to our immediate surroundings, carefully examined and used as source material. It encourages including a broad range of ideas, materials, observations, physical objects, and ephemeral elements found nearby.

The framework revolves around the concept of the model, both as a playful way to explore scale and as a method of setting a scene. The ECAL design workshop amenities are utilized alongside input from art historical examples spanning the 20th century to the present.

The POOL workshop concludes with a presentation at Sebeillon Space on the final day.

Mathis Altmann: Born in Munich, Germany, in 1987. He lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. Mathis Altmann is a multidisciplinary artist known for using assemblage, a form of three-dimensional collage first explored by early modernists associated with the Dada movement.

Vittorio Brodmann: Vittorio Brodmann’s bulbous figures render the emotionality of the contemporary human being: unstable, constantly shifting, and incessantly feeding into meaningful and complicated relationships. His semi-abstract paintings of merging heads and melting eyeballs are rendered in an energetic color palate, congealing with obscure landscapes in the background or frozen in action. Brodmann’s work considers how technology facilitates an outburst of human emotion through over-sharing on public platforms and deliberate digital obscurity. Inspired by comics and sitcom television, the artist seeks to create situations that exaggerate the ordinary.