Vernissage: Clemens Wolf "When Air Holds Its Breath"

Clemens Wolf
In "When Air Holds Its Breath," time itself becomes palpable. Clemens Wolf transforms parachutes into sculptural and painterly structures that capture a moment when everything could tilt — between fall and lift, risk and rescue. The works depict a world in a state of suspension: a breath held before movement occurs.
Wolf engages with the fragility of the moment and the human desire to preserve the ephemeral. Since his early works on urban transition zones — ruins, fences, architectural remnants — he has been exploring those places where change becomes visible. Today, he finds these transitions in the material itself. The fold becomes an event: a stored movement, a unique imprint of force, direction, and time.
In the first room, Parachute Sculptures hang from the ceiling or stand in the space like frozen bodies — parachutes whose fall has been halted. Their folds are fixed with epoxy resin, as if they have captured a moment that cannot actually be held. The Parachute Paintings on the walls break the boundaries between painting and sculpture. What appears as a light texture reveals itself as hard, shaped matter — an optical illusion that only becomes clear upon close contact.
This physical encounter is central:
Only movement and touch expand the eye.
The hand recognizes what the gaze does not know.
Cognitive memory grows through immediate experience.
The second room opens up as a walk-in installation: Taut parachutes form a permeable ceiling that visibly guides light and redefines the architecture. As one walks through, gravity becomes negotiable — a gentle play of stillness and suspension. The fold becomes a threshold, and touch becomes access to a deeper space.
Like snowflakes that find their shape in falling and fade in their uniqueness, each fold carries its own story. None is reproducible. Each is an unrepeatable archive of the moment — and at the same time, of its loss.
Wolf's art is both document and transformation:
It preserves what eludes us in the same moment.
It holds on by showing how time continues to flow.
It makes the invisible tangible.
"When Air Holds Its Breath" is an invitation —
to pause, to doubt, to come closer.
To see how air gains weight.
How suspension takes shape.
How a moment breathes.