On Nina Lola Bachhuber’s Untitled, 2010 (excerpt from the text “What is left”)
By Rachel Gugelberger
With a keen eye for modes of display, Nina Lola Bachhuber combines the formal language of surrealist sculpture with post-minimalist tendencies. Her curious, pseudo-mythological creatures are adorned with an array of decorative elements — hair, beads, nylons, leather — arranged in a manner that heightens the tension and confusion between their intended use and their enigmatic presentation. Bachhuber reconstructs her materials into seemingly ceremonial or devotional objects that revel in a realm of fetishistic obsession that is both playful and sinister. Here, for example, a viewer may see three bewigged skulls transformed into monopodic homunculi displayed on a modernist coffee table, the surface of which is composed of a meticulously hand-drawn pattern of geometric design. Invoking a menacing version of the Three Graces or even a collection of memento mori, Bachhuber’s tableau puts forth a multiplicity of speculative possibilities.
