Seltene Erde (Rare Earth) 2017

Seltene Erde (Rare Earth) 2017 (WV C 021, WV A 127)
Kunstraum Foth, FRAC Alsace (2019) | Fig.1 and 2: Version as a floor installation with spotlight, Fig.3: Version on black base | Sphere made of Brazilian quartzite diameter Sphere: 30 cm

The sculpture Seltene Erde (Rare Earth), a Brazilian quartzite stone milled into a sphere, is placed at the edge of the pedestal.A perfect-looking form in stone, but the artist has not quite finished it, but presents it with ring-shaped milled structures. In the microcosm of the spectacular colorations of the stone, is enclosed the macrocosmic image of a fictitious distant world, an exoplanet seen from the outside. “The milling marks of the machine have eaten into the planet-like form like rotation tracks, next to which one feels as a viewer in a strange, intense way at once oversized and vanishingly tiny” (Dieter Roeschmann). The poetic, ambiguous title Rare Earth refers in science to valuable soil raw materials and in the context of the work also refers to the massive mining, the disappearance of these metals and rocks. The sculpture evokes notions of paradise of longing and thematizes the growing suspicion that our planet is not singular after all but is integrated into a universe with other forms of existence. Like many of Jochen Kitzbihler's stone sculptures Jochen Kitzbihler's stone sculptures, it is an "objet trouvé". partially found object and material: The artist found the sphere in the warehouse of a cooperating stone company that offers luxurious garden design. The sculptural intervention is, as is often the case with Jochen Kitzbihler, restrained-minimal. The artistic gesture in this work does not consist in production but in finding, appropriating, presentation, and transformation into a new context.