Clemens Wolf — Exhibition at Kempinski Bodrum

Hosted by SANATORIUM Gallery

In the light-filled spaces of Kempinski Bodrum, Clemens Wolf unfolds a visual landscape where material and gesture encounter gravity, air, and chance. This exhibition, curated by Sanatorium Gallery IB, gathers key bodies of Wolf’s work—from monumental outdoor installations to intimate painted surfaces—each negotiating the delicate balance between control and release, permanence and transience.

Suspended Choreographies

At the heart of the exhibition are parachute works, suspended in the hotel’s soaring atrium. Bundled in vivid hues—pink, yellow, blue—their sculptural presence hovers between collapse and flight, weight and weightlessness. Once instruments of descent, these parachutes become sculptural forms of anticipation, their folds and cords drawing lines of tension into the architecture itself.

Outdoors, on the green edge where landscape meets sea, Wolf stages a quartet of parachute spires. Rising from the earth in red, yellow, green, and blue, they resemble vibrant markers of gravity stretched into monumentality. Their presence connects the earthbound with the skyward, standing like totems of both fragility and endurance.

Parachutes Transformed

On the wall, Wolf reinterprets parachutes as folded reliefs, coated in resin, their draped surfaces frozen mid-motion. A curtain of orange fabric glows with both sensuality and industrial sharpness, its folds preserved in time yet echoing movement. Nearby, a crimson relief pulses with intensity—an almost visceral surface where drapery meets painting, volume becomes skin, and chance is sealed in permanence.

The Expanded Metal Paintings

In dialogue with these fabric-based works are Wolf’s Expanded Metal Paintings. Using industrial mesh as a printing tool, Wolf layers pigment in textures that oscillate between randomness and pattern. The double-framed diptych, with teal lines crossing fields of coral and rose, resembles both cartography and dreamscape. Larger canvases in blue-yellow and red fields vibrate with chromatic density, recalling the gestures of Abstract Expressionism yet grounded in process-driven materiality.

Between Material and Memory

Together, these works unfold as a meditation on transformation. Parachutes—once instruments of survival—become suspended sculptures, frozen reliefs, or monumental landmarks. Metal grids, once functional barriers, transmute into painterly matrices of light and rhythm. Each carries its history while Wolf renders it anew, allowing accidents, folds, and imprints to define form.

A Site of Encounter

At Kempinski Bodrum, where nature, architecture, and sea converge, Wolf’s works create a dialogue with their surroundings. The suspended parachutes resonate with the atrium’s verticality; the spires rise in counterpoint to trees and horizon; the paintings invite close, tactile contemplation. The exhibition is less a static display than a living choreography of materials, staging the interplay of fragility and monumentality, chance and intention, ephemerality and permanence.