Text by Sacha Craddock:

There is such a strong difference between Europe and Britain in its approach to sculpture. It is here in Britain about a process of questioning, ‘What is that? ‘Why is that?’, the result of heavy doubt, perhaps, about artistic endeavour. Or is it just more to do with a plain protestant aversion to the physical presence of just about anything at all? In art education the desire to allow something to exist is generally thwarted by the need to say why. Krebber’s insistence in the belief that it is radical to make something exist is crucial. Artists tend to know what they are not long before they know what they are and his pronounced attitude; ‘its big, its shiny, its autonomous’ poses a tremendous challenge from the start. Whether huge, extremely small, heavy or light, the physical fact is confrontational in its insistent actuality.

The fact that taste steers towards the minimal; to the ability to turn the film off at night, to put it away in the cupboard might come also out of a rather obvious reaction to Public Art. It has become orthodox to dismiss ‘heroic’ sculpture, to characterise the huge lump, just about anywhere, as, macho, mediocre and meaningless. Yet when Krebber sets out every time, in a decidedly humorous manner, to appear to create ‘art for art’s sake’, he is perhaps also playing with the inbuilt aversion to a formal sculptural practice.

There is perhaps a contradiction between this questioning, verbal attitude to art and the fact that, in the presence of the sculptural object, people will still tend to be respectful of the endeavour. Something physical takes over. Richard Serra said that to reduce a sculpture to its image is to deny the temporal experience of the work. ‘But it could be that people want to consume sculpture like they consume paintings - through photographs ‘…’I am interested in the experience of sculpture, where it resides.’


Krebber deals with the floating space with the concrete cladding bringing the outside in and vice versa, by setting up a relation between the sculptural pieces. He talks also about ‘the sculpture really trying to live there’. The sculpture which tries ‘to live there’ inhabits a place, and sets up a relation to itself. Whether still, or about movement, decay or entropy, Krebber is not so much dealing with what something suggests as with what it actually does or can do. There is a double metaphor here, where the belief in the extension of something is borne out in its reality.

In the case of this 1960’s architecture, the experience of the work within it, provides a harnessing of moment and experience, a sense of extended time. How, now, can the abstraction of an element carry its own justification? The relation to audience is, of course, a huge and inevitable consideration. What is a democratic use of space? How independent are these pieces? Is their site specificity different from the accepted liberal expectation of the phrase?

One of the main points with this work is that it is received, existent at that moment of perception, and nothing initially to do with its either its history or materiality. This introduces the basic modern idea of excavation, the cross-section of time and moment.
‘Jelly Beam’ 2005, a vaulting horse of semi-translucent material, holds liquid and froth still within its set state. The casting and holding of material means that the source is denied, and that the relation to this particular material is not at all obvious. ‘Northwestkunst’ 2005 is an orange, transparent, slightly rounded beam, which seems sweet and keeps a sense of pleasure and desire. The feeling it gives off is quite charming and sensible, expected even. Instead of seeming alien, this somehow reasonable associative element slides alongside the architectural detail. The relation to place and space extends beyond the visual and formal to inhabit the building’s cracks and fibre.


‘Pond’ 2005, typically combines the two sculptural qualities of flow and control. A sharp line is cut through in contradiction to the movement of material and the work seems held tight within its own potential. The material is perhaps made even more abstract in the way that its true sense is thwarted. So instead of a work of the early 1970’s with, for example , Linda Benglis reaching out to formality by being informal, this work phases the formal right in. Krebber talks of his attitude being ‘manneristic’, the sort of value-added precedent that replaces the question about whether something can exist with the emphatic insistence that it does.


But so much is just great big stuff, shiny wrapped elements which in no way use the notion of something animate but are instead upright, upstanding, strict and tense, even if later it may collapse. Instead of the touch, for instance, of Eva Hesse, where the wrought, or bought, material creates a voodoo sense of a souvenir, Krebber makes each piece the incident, and the encounter with it a fact that cannot be denied. The plausibility comes with an expectation from sculpture rather than the unexpected in the usual sense of the word.
Does the material have some sort of life independent of artistic will? Not really. A piece made for Sadlers Wells was organic in that it had a life that changed over time. It did suggest there, in front of the thoroughfare, above the doorway, scaling, curling, three stories up towards the roof, some sort of habitation.

The tubular, knot coloured pieces, however, play with established ideas of confused scale; the abstract method of rendering the small huge, and vice versa. These pieces combine a faint suggestion of imagery, hence the descriptive role automatically placed upon each of them. Krebber, relaxed about his titles, makes a determined stance, however, to distance the work from the linear hop, skip and jump of interpretation. Spaghetti, food, movement, voluptuousness, jelly, cling film; the material and sense is necessarily always transformed. There are dumb inanimate lumps, PIP 2006, for instance, leans against the wall, there, not alluding to the suggestion of something else, remaining wholeheartedly a fact.

You get the sense of almost bloody minded endeavour. Why not, lets? How can something that exists be abstract? Is this a form of still life? It certainly has the obvious and useful pull in sculptural terms between outline and mass, between cartoon humour, and an up close physical surface. Krebber admits to admiring the monolithic presence and sharp outline of sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. Her work has the ability to be many things in its combination of imposing line, grandeur and yet with a softness to the material. There is a continuous relation to gravity, the physical experience of the work rather than its image.

Aware of making things that annoy, however, Krebber creates a sense of disquiet and difficulty; not unbelievable but existing , nevertheless, able to mimic the annoyance, perhaps, of knowing that a day has to be completely written off. To exist yet not to be able to think openly, well or laterally. The object is always is like that, not even about an over view, the physical reality counters and squashes understanding. You become ‘something that has not reason to be there’, and the logic of illogic come in, because it apes a particular uselessness. Sculpture can remind of the most basic as it can bring some thing, intangible as image, up close.

‘Flügel’, Wing, is shiny, the material gelatine, sugar, pallet wrap. Think about the constant pull, typified by a need to set up a questioning that goes beyond the old Pop Art tactic, where the ‘everyday’ is recognisable, only bigger. ‘Schwarm- schwarm’ with sticky post-it notes makes a mass relief, a shallow flutter, like loose wooden tiles cladding the tower of a Nordic church. This thatched, mass material, makes some sort of collective sense, however, with the skin describing the topographical shape of a country, perhaps.


Some of the material, very culinary, is really about the mixture of translucency and opacity, the ability to pour and set. The material is used for what it can do rather than what it is. A contemporary sense of the ridiculous is also wholeheartedly incorporated. Krebber’s interest in Guston is relevant in that Guston used humour, cartoon, caricature to populate his paintings, and, as he once said, also the studio once he leaves.. Kreber takes a blunt, comedic stance with sculpture that currently, anyway, has to carry a touch of self-deprecating denial about it.

So not only is the question surrounding the piece about a sort of individual presence but then the notion of experience is constantly brought into the relationship. Artists are, more than ever, expected to be judge, juror and defendant of their own work - all at the same time.

For Krebber there is a real joy in the fact that some of the work is temporary even though it suggests such a stance of permanence. Just as there is a use of the monumental - the work is often ridiculously large – but then other works can, as Kreber says, be ‘edibly’ small. The precedent, really, is clear. A block, a lump, a slimy surface, a presence, an emphatic thing, whether rough prop or theatrical device, can still give the sense of something that has been there, for real, for a long time.

Sacha Craddock February 11th 2007