ART + CULTURE: Nina Lola Bachhuber’s surreal sculptures explore magic, myth and mortality
Artworks: Nina Lola Bachhuber
Words: Emma de Clercq
Artist Nina Lola Bachhuber combines sculpture, drawing and installation to create strange, uncanny pieces often focused on the body, both human and animal. Describing her choice of materials and colours as ways to “evoke fetish associations and surrealist qualities”, hair is a recurring medium.
By using hair, often in conjunction with bones and animal skin, her sculptures bring to mind ritualistic objects, such as sacred totems or idols used for sinister voodoo. The use of certain colours further suggest these ritualistic connotations, with recurring flashes of blood red and purple (a colour which, due to its rarity in nature, has come to be associated with the supernatural, spirituality, and mourning). By contrast, Bachhuber’s use of geometric motifs and a predominantly monochrome colour palette offers a different perspective through its modern, minimal aesthetic. The effect is powerful in its complete contradiction to the primal wildness suggested in her sculptures, seeming to displace these mysterious creatures from their otherworldly realm.