Aubrey Theobald

Aubrey Theobald

Work from Touch, Spring / Berührung, Frühling.

“Spring appears to us percolating in waiting as an accumulation of subtle variations – shifts in green light, delicate flirtations, a moment of warmth on your cheek – unfolding in partial fragments, both fleeting and constructed.”

It seems that a similar uninhibited, raw beauty delicately captures the large-scale, accumulative sculptural installation created by Aubrey Theobald in Berlin. However, in the case of her exhibition TOUCH, SPRING / BERUHRUNG, FRUHLING, the felicitation of light that spring begets carries a shade of pale yellow, a found object, a scent of chamomile, and melancholic ruminations on the cello.

Presented in the midst of the harsh Berlin winter in January, TOUCH, SPRING, reaches for warmth in its surroundings. Through locational specificity and ritual, Theobald creates an architecture of feeling where infrastructure supports delicate wisps of meaning between the anguish and romance found in a season of waiting. Delicate, Berlin-specific interventions of rule govern our navigation through found (zum Verschenken) materials and deteriorating, hyper-sentimentalized fragments of the artist’s romanticized daily life. Theobald takes on a season of ritual where the immediate environment becomes a mirror to our intrapersonal life.

Connection and collaboration serve as one of many coping mechanisms of the artist. The exhibition features a sound score, Kiss, Kiss, with Martin Edigi and Wojtek Prażuch, both of whom were invited to respond to Theobald’s emotive score on spring. Their responses, unbeknownst to one another, later melded as an intrapersonal conversation, positioning viewers in an intimate dialogue between strangers. Through the bureaucratic unit of a Baumschutzkorb and the image of a rose (both found, captured, and collected on significant days), Theobald and Jesse Ly negotiate how to lean on and support whom we love from a distance while grief, loss, and loneliness outweigh physical proximity.

Despite this abundance of objects with seemingly unclear origins and purposes, we do not feel as if we have entered some kind of Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities). The feeling is one of wholeness, homogeneity, gentle power, and some inexplicable childish melancholy. Everything leads us to delicate interventions of personal ritual, not dissimilar to the functions of soft bureaucracy allowing us to take away a bouquet of weeds on our way home.?

Cloying, pensive, and over-sentimentalized, Touch, Spring holds onto the fragments that slip our grasp and awaits our seasonal return to warmth.” – Boris Kostadinov and Aubrey Theobald

‘Zadie Smith describes the “splashy spring” in North London as having a “shade of green for every possible felicitation of light,” emphasizing its unplanned,
raw beauty.

*Handstraußregelung legislates the threshold between public and private aesthetics, a rule (a very small, controlled gesture) that allows us to take home one
bouquet of weeds every day, gauged by the size of “a palm.”