Around 2000 years ago, the technique of origami was developed in Asia to create a cultural technique for which nature served as a model: regardless of whether the subject is flower buds, wings, anatomical features, or later, the molecular form of DNA – natural forms are reproduced by folding, bending, or crumpling, in such a way that a complex spatial construct, usually representational, is created. The Japanese name for this technique, Origami, is a compound of two Japanese words, ‘ori’ (root verb ‘oru’) meaning to fold, and ‘kami’ meaning paper, spread to Europe in the nineteenth century, where its original, more religious-ceremonial purpose was replaced by the entertainment value of the activity.
Today, however, the origami principle has long ceased to be just a pastime, but is used in science and technology as well as in architecture, design, and art. It is used to construct large solar sails in space as well as microscopically small robots, which are used in bionics and introduced into the human body in order to unfold and transport drugs to specific locations. In art, this principle is applied to create an interior and exterior – not as in classical sculpture, by adding and removing, but by using the two primary origami folding methods known as the mountain fold and the valley fold.
Many of Alke Reeh's works are based on the principle of the folding of surfaces or the entanglement of forms. While the origami principle is often used in technical areas to develop stable forms that can withstand extreme weight, as in aircraft construction, Alke Reeh's sculptures seem rather unstable. Her rosette- or cassette-shaped fields of sewed ceilings (since 2009) consist of textiles that are otherwise used in the manufacture of tents and seat cushions. They are reminiscent of natural forms such as plant parts or bat wings. Although they rise from the wall as clearly contoured reliefs, they possess a certain mobility and changeability, since they can be folded together and unfolded again with just a few hand movements. The objects themselves appear to be unfastened in an uncomplicated way – the threads are not trimmed, sewn, but hang down clearly visible from the object, resulting in associations with draped fabrics, skirts, and ornate fans. The artist openly bridges the gap between free and applied art. As in the case of objects of everyday use, these textile sculptures have an inherent functional potential, which is not however realized in the object itself, but – as is the case with conceptual art – takes place primarily in the mind of the beholder.
Craftsmanship plays a central role in many of the artist's works, for example in Einblick – Ausblick (Insight – Outlook), a series of photographs taken intermittently from 2009, which she has decorated with ornamental embroideries reminiscent of curtains or screens, behind which hides a world that at times seems familiar and at other times rather exotic. Façades showing clear indications of aging and deterioration as can be found in Asian and African countries, are juxtaposed with examples of flawlessly uniform German terraced housing. But by obscuring the direct view in very similar ways, what is one’s own suddenly appears strange. By this disguising of the most varied places, Alke Reeh invites viewers to take a close look and question established patterns of perception and thought. Thus, the view through the Antwerp lace suddenly reminds us of the traditional decorative carved wood latticework of mashrabiya the architectural element in the form of a projecting enclosed window which is characteristic of Arabic residences, including palaces, and sometimes in public buildings including mosques, hospitals, and government buildings, and which are found throughout the Islamic world. And when she has a simple plastic shopping bag decorated with elaborate, traditional embroidery by mostly male craftspeople from different countries, she also breaks with the usual attributions of value in work and production contexts.
In fact, ornamentation can be found in all countries of the world and can therefore be understood as a symbol for complex cultural transfer processes between cultures. Whether it be intricate arabesques or the strictly geometric meander – also often inspired by the forms of nature, they were originally in their abstract form mostly the expression of a search for an all-encompassing, cosmic order. Ornamentation not only plays a central role in sacred contexts, but it also functions as decoration in everyday contexts. It was precisely this field of tension –between philosophical-religious symbolism, traditional craftsmanship, and the flat surface of beautiful appearance – that also prompted its critics in the course of modernism: in 1908, for example, Adolf Loos denounced the ornamental as a violation in order to counter it with the unadorned, functional language of form. At the same time, however, there were also artists such as Karl Blossfeldt who focused on the tectonics of natural forms. With his strong photographic enlargements of plants that seem like archaic totems or architectures, the sculptor and teacher founded a school of a new way of seeing. The photographs, which initially served as a didactic means of introducing his students to nature through his role of teacher of art and technology, were suddenly treated as autonomous works of art in art exhibition by Berlin gallery owner Karl Nierendorf, who contrasted the photographs with sculptures from Africa and New Guinea, and with the publication of the book Art Forms in Nature (1928), which presents nature's abundant wealth of forms in order to sharpen a new awareness of the world of phenomena.
When Alke Reeh now picks up on this long, international tradition of ornamentation – as well as its critical examination – she is less interested in celebrating the beauty resulting from the act of ornamentation, but rather in making viewers aware of a certain kind of global migration of forms, and above all in sharpening their senses. Therefore, for her exhibition in Backnang, the artist takes the exhibition space as her point of departure with the purpose of creating a meaningful dialog between the location and the works. By picking up the structure of the Gothic church windows with her rosette-shaped seams, or in Within the Realms of Possibility (2016) creating an illusion of space as in a baroque trompe-l'œil painting, in which she optically doubles the folded photograph of a ceiling structure with a mirror, she continues to play with the visitors perceptions in order to create sensitivity for a specific space. The historic, unusually positioned architecture of the Backnang City Gallery is used to great advantage in the artist’s presentation of a proliferating structure of rhizome-like mirroring spatial puzzles and demonstrates the difference between rigid order and a random collection using the example of a shelf-like room divider. In this way, the artist takes viewers with her on her journey of research in which she playfully and sensuously analyzes forms and thinks surfaces further in order to develop a new awareness for the Essence of Appearances (Alke Reeh) in the world.