“When I moved in, I did a thorough clean. In the cellar I found an object, something that had been wrapped up and packaged. I took it upstairs with me and set it down without unwrapping it. When I was later invited to contribute something artistic for a kindergarten, I opened the parcel to see what was inside, wrapped it up again and handed it in. I called it Geschenk (present).” Gabriele Obermaier.

Moving out, moving around and moving in are threshold incidents that we have all shared at some point during our lives. We leave old, familiar spaces and move into new, unfamiliar ones. Real and fictional. In these new spaces, we encounter legacies that are witness to the stories of others. We all know such objects. We throw them in the rubbish when they seem worthless to us, but we have paid money for the valuable things the former tenants left behind, thereby making them a part of our own story.

“To the collector, the world is present in each of his objects and is in fact classified too.” Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), volume I, p.274

The mustering appropriation of objects in a room we call inhabiting. Here, everything is given a place and with the place a reason for it. All things lead to the collector who withdraws them from their involvement in the world and centres them in his or her world. They are given a place in the collector’s space and story. One creates a cosmos in order to settle in it. This gives one a reason for the acquisition of a fetish, and thus the barter is perfected.

The antithesis to the collector is the allegorist. In this case, the world is present in each of the objects possessed, but as a mystery. Allegorists do not direct the things towards themselves and make them accomplices to their habits but rather leave them as a mysterious superficies which, when touched, draws one out onto open terrain. The allegorist is designated as a flâneur who empathizes with the soul of the world. In this world nothing becomes familiar, but remains infinitely convoluted.

Gabriele Obermaier has created a sculpture that appears to be a single convolution. In an object as a convolution, the categories of inside and outside, of substance and superficies, of content and form blur to an indifference. The object stops opposing the curious I and becomes a threshold experience of the I and the world. In this spatialization, there is neither total reason nor actual reason. It is the marking out of an idiosyncratic border within which nothing belongs to anybody, but neither is it set free. In this occurrence of an outside that is an inside and of an inside that is an outside, nothing need be opened in order to gaze upon the truth.

“Geschenk” is a sculpture as a gesture. As a passing-on of an openness in which the artist becomes a messenger. A Hermes carrying a message that neither presumes to speak on behalf of the sender – law; nor on behalf of the recipient – reason.

Consequently, “Geschenk” is its own double as the possibility of infinite repetition and sequence. That it has been cast in bronze by the artist and brought into the world as a variant of itself, as an object that could be produced en masse, is the radical formulation of a position brought to a conclusion in which the work is not a constitutive hallmark of a star artist but the possible enactment of its own disappearance.

Here, perhaps, is the decisive difference to Christo. When he depletes objects by wrapping them, thereby bringing them to their own zero point, then he is the anti-demiurge on which even deconstruction constructs a self that wishes to be born as eternal. Seen like this, he is a collector of himself. Gabriele Obermaier remains a re-shaper and a re-caster, a white sheet of paper which folds into itself in its own work.

Michael Hofstetter 2011