The starting point for Axel Lieber’s works are usually objects from the everyday world.

Through radical interventions such as the gutting or reduction of an object to its contour lines, the shifting of proportions or the use of the visual language techniques of cartoons, the artist places objects in irritating contexts and thus makes them experienceable in a different or new way.

Axel Lieber liberates everyday objects from their actual function and, through precise manipulative interventions, transforms them into a form of appearance that encourages the viewer to question and override established categories and ideas.

Axel Lieber discovers the distant in the near, the strange in the familiar, the mysterious and abysmal in the obvious. His works examine the relationship between body, space and sculpture, they deal with essential sculptural principles such as the relationship between inside and outside, fullness and emptiness, and they discuss such diverse themes as abstraction, constructivism, minimalism, design, pop and fashion.

The liberating impulse stored in Axel Lieber’s work is ultimately based on the transformation of the existing, on opening up and developing completely new fields of combination and association. Our relationship to the space around us and to things is neither predetermined nor unchangeable, but rather needs to be measured and explored anew.

In the exhibition “Corporate Architecture” for the PMCA, he transforms inconspicuous packaging boxes for light bulbs, medicines and anchovies into architectural models. By cutting out all visual or written information, empty spaces are created that reveal an architectural shell that is not based on function, but solely on redundancy.

www.axellieber.com

www.ingesidee.de

Axel Lieber (*1960 in Düsseldorf) lives and works in Stockholm and Berlin. 1978-1984 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, sculpture class. Since 1993 projects on art in public space with inges idee (H. Hemmert, Axel Lieber, T.A. Schmidt and G. Zey). Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm since 2016.

soloexhibitions. a.o.: MAAB Gallery, Milano, I (2024),  Taubert Contemporary, Berlin, D (2024), Galleri Ping Pong, Malmö, S (2022), Galerie Mark Müller, Zürich, CH (2021), Hengesbach Gallery, Wuppertal, D (2021), Double Dutch, hangmen projects, Stockholm, S (2016 with Mari Rantanen), Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, USA (2004), Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, S (2002)

groupexhibitions a.o.: Blue is the Color of Your Eyes, Moderna Museet Malmö, S (2019), Berlinzulage, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, D (2018), REVISION, new presentation of the collection, Kunstmuseum Bonn, D (2017), SPACES, Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle, Freiburg/Br., D (2013), Modernautställningen 2010, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, S (2010), Berlin Transfer, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, D, (2010)