Pernice moved to West Berlin in 1988, a year before the fall of the wall that divided West and East Germany, and during a period in which Berlin was a poor and provincial complement to the then-center of the cultural world, Cologne. As a student, Pernice was witness to the rebuilding of the newly reunified city – often by residents themselves in DIY living spaces, squats, and communes – and the ambivalent reconciliation of its vastly heterogenous architecture and infrastructure. Pernice is a member of a foundational generation of Berlin artists that includes Nairy Baghramian, Christoph Schlingensief, and Isa Genzken, who share an irreverent attunement to the city’s public spaces.  

In the center of the gallery are two bench-like constructions from Pernice’s series of Merzbanks. The title of the series refers to the assemblage artist Kurt Schwitters’s (1887-1948) Merz concept – an offshoot of the Dada movement – so named after a collage Schwitters made incorporating a cut-out advertisement for the German bank Commerz – und Handselbank. Using found objects and urban detritus, Schwitters went on to create numerous Merz artworks that culminated in a series of Merzbauten. The first of these house-sized installations was created in his home in Hanover between 1923 and 1937, when he fled the ascending Nazi regime to Norway. The Hanover Merzbau was later destroyed in an Allied bombing.  

Plateau (Study), 2004 and Bank, 2003, recall the unassuming aesthetics of public seating while also suggesting the pedestals used in contemporary museum presentations, whose simple designs are intended to render these supports invisible, drawing the viewer’s full attention to the objects placed atop. Overturning this usually hidden hierarchy of value, these somewhat unstable and unfinished-looking sculptures fuse the support with the artwork, while also adopting a questionable functionality.  Adding to the ambiguity, Plateau (Study) suggests public infrastructure built for rolling, like ramps or skateboard parks, while its title refers to the natural feature that is often invoked to describe a feeling of stasis or paralysis.  

Lighting up the far side of the Public Gallery, Untitled, 2003, is one of an ongoing number of lamps Pernice has created out of crudely assembled found objects. Comprising a grandmotherly floral lampshade affixed to a discarded iron rod that has been roughly welded to a spare tire, the lamp is suggestive of rummaging through previous generations’ detritus to furnish the present. Standing at the scale of a real lamp and fully electrified, this untitled structure raises questions about the comfort or unease of creating a home shaped by the past, much as Schwitters’s Merzbau was a response to the illogic of the traditional family home after the devastation of the first World War and on the eve of the second.  

In the opposite corner, another standing sculpture, Pointless – Panorama, 2006, creates a 360 view of the gallery space. Peering into the broken mirror at the top of this strange octagonal pillar, one slowly comes to realize that they are looking at a commercial glasses display stand, with all of its signage and merchandise removed, recalling Schwitters’s appropriation of advertising. The title Pernice bestows upon the work, Pointless – Panorama, gives a sense of its potential scope: “pointless” without its products to aid one’s vision, its mirrors nonetheless offer a “panorama” of the space surrounding the sculpture. A constructed ruin of its former self, it may be “pointless” in the sense of utility, but it takes on new meaning as a symbol for the limitations of consumer culture and our abilities of foresight. 

Pernice’s work, which was acquired in 2022, connects deeply with the Nasher’s collection. In particular, his use of found object assemblage, architectural references, and the politicized employment of everyday objects strongly resonates with artists from across the 20th Century.  

On the far side of the Public Gallery, John Storrs’s (1885-1956) Study in Architectural Forms (Forms in Space), 1927, finds inspiration in a new feature of the American urban landscape: the skyscraper. This totemic bronze depicts the mutual fascination between modernist sculpture and modernist architecture with a simplified, slightly abstracted skyscraper, which could either be read as a single symmetrical building, or a series of proliferating identical structures tightly packed into a perspectival space. 

Hanging on the back wall are an assemblage by Ivan Puni (1890-1956) and two lead reliefs by Jasper Johns (b. 1930). Puni’s Construction Relief, ca. 1915-16, is an iconoclastic early sculpture by the artist that combines ornately decorated elements symbolic of an old world with the geometric forms, industrial materials, and akimbo Cubist construction of an emerging post-World War I modernism. A couple of generations later, Johns produced Light Bulb and Flag, both 1969, as part of a series of six embossed lead reliefs that depict what he calls “things the mind already knows”: objects or symbols so familiar that one doesn’t truly see them anymore. Provocatively including the American flag – a symbol that took on new meaning for many people due to the then-ongoing Vietnam War – Johns presents these everyday objects in a different sensual form, embossed into a stark, cool metal surface, to challenge the viewer to take a fresh look at things we think we know.  

About Manfred Pernice 

Pernice studied sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts. His work has been the subject of numerous solo museum presentations, including at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, Haus der Kunst, Munich, SMAK Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium, The Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, Kunsthalle Zurich, Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.  Pernice’s work has also been featured in a number of important international surveys including the 55th Carnegie International, Skulptur Projekte Munster 07, the 49th and 50th Venice Biennales, Documenta XI, and the groundbreaking exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century at the New Museum, New York, in 2007. His work graces the collections of museums in Europe and the United States including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; LACMA; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; MOCA LA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; TATE, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.