TRANSFORMATION: Pieter Obels | Todd & Fitch | Wim Ricourt

Pieter Obels is a master of Corten steel, yet what his works convey above all is light and grace as he bends the steel into extraordinarily delicate and winding shapes. The two artistic worlds couldn’t be further apart. It is almost as if we were watching the yin and yang of the same material. In spite of the fact that steel is generally considered as rough and austere, Obels’ sculptures seem to be controverting the intrinsic possibilities of the material. When one looks at Pieter Obel’s  figures of steel and wonder at the curves he manages to give his material, feelings of huge weight, size and strength arise. 

Through a clever interplay of rigidity and dynamism, Obels work occupies a space deftly lingering between a sense of weight and weightlessness. His sculptures completely confound our perceptions of how a steel sculpture should look like and behave. The bends in the work appear to defy what the material can be persuaded to do.  Obels aim is to create totally organic forms with an extreme yet somehow innate sense of plasticity. This sense of a natural rhythm makes his sculptures sit with a total oneness in any natural surrounding. Working alone without assistants, Obels has, however, permitted this aspect to dominate his works at same time as he emphasized the elegiac quality that they possess. Although totally contemporary, there is a strong wistfulness for a bygone age which favoured poetry over power and fragility and balance over industrial noise. The sense of a precarious balance which many of his works have, play beautifully with the apparent contradiction inherent in his material.