Studio Visit: Richard Green

Richard Green is a Berlin-based artist. His material and process-driven practice, realised primarily as sculptures, strives to create dialogues between objects and systems, which make the complex and serious more understandable through a playful and sometimes absurd approach.

Earlier this month, Green collaborated with PUMA to launch their latest VELOPHASIS sneaker. Titled FUTURE ARCHEOLOGY, the collaboration was set in the concrete, brutalist walls of LOBE BLOCK Berlin and reflected a stone-like landscape that begged to reveal the treasures it holds. The concept was translated into a unique performance, which saw the performer Dennis Loebach hammering open blocks of cement made by Green until the sneakers were eventually found.

SLEEK meets Green in Wünsdorf-Waldstadt at his studio – in a military compound that once stationed 40,000 Soviet soldiers and is now inhabited by creatives – to speak about this collaboration, his process and how sculpture becomes a vessel for communication.

SLEEK: How did you find yourself as a sculptor?

Richard Green: I guess it kind of started quite early on in my life. I spent a lot of my childhood building treehouses in the woods or problem solving through ambitious lego models. Sculpture naturally appeared to me to be a progression from these sorts of playful activities – and it seemed to be something I was good at. Clearly those early experiences left an impression on me. It‘s funny, Des, my art professor at college, helped me discover my passion for sculpture as an art form – and now here I am 12 years later still in contact with him and we are planning a potential collaboration together later this year.

S: Your work utilises a playful approach through the use of seemingly everyday objects to communicate a message. What is your process from idea to conception?

RG: Some projects start out very loosely and grow into something almost naturally. For example, my Loop projects started in 2D, with my eyes closed, translating completely random flourishes and hand motions onto scraps of paper before even thinking about them as sculptures. The artworks ended up as these dark, infinitely looping bronze sculptures, cast from pieces of cacti, through lost-wax bronze casting, a fairly complex, time consuming (and expensive!) process. When you see the finished pieces, it’s weird to think that they all started off as a spontaneous mark on a piece of paper.

Meanwhile, for my ongoing ‘sugar’ projects I have to work in a more planned-out, methodical way; the process is far less playful or spontaneous in that regard. Each piece has to be thought out, designed and rendered digitally before the casting-model can be CNC’d and shipped from Switzerland. The fickle nature of working with boiled sugar means the process can be quite challenging from an engineering perspective. In this case the playfulness and absurdity comes more through these strange objects and how they interact with their environment, rather than through the process itself.

S: Why is art sculpture a source of communication for you? 

RG: All art is communication and every concept seems to have an ‘ideal‘ medium through which it is best communicated. But I think this also works in reverse. I just happen to love making objects so that affects how I think and perceive the world around me through objects, spaces and traces.

Again, for these sugar projects I started with casting, in boiled sugar, these bizarre concrete military forms taken from the area around my studio. Because they’re cast in such an unstable, dissolving, ephemeral material; I realised that the process of fast-forward decay needs to be documented as part of the piece. It came to me that the whole concept and process can only be properly communicated and documented through moving image. So the sculptures themselves became just a starting point, actors or props within a film, which I’m working on at the moment.

S: Your work questions the “footprint of human life”, exploring the friction between the natural and the artificial. How were you led to such a theme?

RG: I think it has a lot to do with my double life. I live in Berlin but my studio is out in Brandenburg, situated on an abandoned Soviet-era military base. We have electricity but no internet or running water. Some of the abandoned buildings on the site have trees growing out of the roof or floor and the asphalt ‘drill square’ has been entirely overpowered by nature. Living across these opposing locations really forces you to think about the way we live our lives and how this impacts our increasing disconnection with the natural world.

S: What drives you?

RG: Deadlines seem to be working for me.

S: You have recently collaborated with PUMA to launch their latest sneaker style. Why is collaboration important when it comes to creating? 

RG: Collaboration is absolutely essential for larger projects where a wide variety of skills and experience is needed. The Puma collaboration wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my friends and other artists I’ve met over the years. This project consisted of three large scale pieces and 80 separate cast blocks each containing a pair of trainers. In the end, we worked through three tons of plaster, so having extra hands on the project was definitely helpful!

S: The collaboration also includes a workshop. What do you value about sharing with others? 

RG: This is about art as performance or something to be shared. And these sharing-experiences are a natural way of meeting new people who might not otherwise be exposed to these sculptural processes and might have interesting perspectives on it. Aside from that, there was this amazing child-like fun – hitting these huge, heavy blocks of plaster with sledge hammers to reveal the trainers inside. I think everyone really enjoyed it and I had fun. I learnt a lot through this collaboration and I was happy it was received so well by everyone involved.

Credits

Photographer: Pietro Groff
Stylist: Quirin Emanga
Hair & Makeup: Marvin Glissmann at We Love PR using Anastasia Beverly Hills
Casting Director for Liza Edwards: Chisom at Whitecasting
Models: Dennis Loebach at Izaio Management and Liza Edward at Mint Model management
Concept & Creative Producer: Claude Gerber
Production Assistant: Quirin Emanga
Photography Assistant: Claude Gerber