With the installation Wundertüte, Johannes Hugo Stoll shows the results of his collaboration with his father. The project began when his father asked his son if he would make a death mask of him. He agreed on the condition that both of them would make masks of each other. As a result, two bronze casts were created with the title Bronze Wrapped Bubble. The cooperation led to further works in different media: an audio recording of the two singing in the shower and four video works. The latter use different stylistic means, partly abstract and partly documentary, to tell of the father-son relationship and the process of developing a joint work of art.
Every fortnight, another video was added to the exhibition, thus expanding the narrative by a chapter, while at the same time the singing of father and son could be heard as a unifying element throughout the duration.
Jan Nicola Angermann
In his past and current works, Johannes Hugo Stoll re-organises and re-produces, making use of pre-existing practices and materials of his environment to further objects and images that display their own being on the move and thus thematise, critically and humorously question their place of origin and destination.
His search for form begins with a search along the figure of the human body and its needs in everyday life to the basic elements of the production of the self, for which he places the relations of the outside and the inside at the centre of his practice.
To this end, he takes things in hand, understands them literally, examines them in terms of their use and handling in order to bring about a localisation or unlocalisation. Last but not least, he wants to emphasise the performative, dynamic and uncontrollable effects of our actions.
With a basic conceptual and sculptural interest, he leans on currents of appropriation art to create potential voids between everyday culture and high culture.
