“Less is more”: Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum could also be Albrecht Schäfer’s working motto. Instead of simply adopting the modernist economy of forms, he deconstructs it very artfully. The starting point for his staged interventions – often filling up entire gallery spaces – are form developments of Modernism that have become common property of everyday design. Instead of designing anew, he creates new attentiveness with the aid of targeted removal, omission or changing what is already there. Thus, he transferred an entire edition of the English tabloid “The Sun” to canvas. While he did this page by page, at the original scale, he began to leave out progressively more information and ultimately revealed a grid system that recalls the geometric structure of Constructivist pictures: Behind each report stands a Mondrian. In another case, he took 310 roof battens that were a little longer than the height of the room and mounted them between floor and ceiling. Bent as they were, the raw wooden laths looked like sinus waves. Architecture thereby was converted into a picture and a traversable sculpture.

Spiral Blinds are groups of two or three twirling aluminum blinds that penetrate each other and create clever effects. Schäfer’s starting point is simple, found, industrially-produced materials. In his work, he recovers some of the poetic intensity that Naum Gabo’s light-space sculptures or Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column display. And this is definitely more than their standardized epigones in design and interior architecture do.

Albrecht Schäfer was born in Stuttgart in 1967 and lives in Berlin. Trained in Munich, London, and Brunswick, Schäfer draws conclusions from the oversupply of art history and sharpens our eye to what already exists.