Matthias Alfen's Art

By Judy Kim

A mathematician confided
That a Möbius band is one-sided,
And you’ll get quite a laugh,
If you cut one in half,
For it stays in one piece when divided.

–A limerick by unknown author

The first time I laid eyes on Matthias Alfen’s sculpture Falling Man (2004) as a part of the jurying process for Housatonic Museum of Art’s first open juried show in spring 2005 it made an immediate and visceral imprint in my mind. The jurying process at HMA was no different than other exhibitions I had juried. Applicants had submitted slides or electronic images of their work. I looked at all of the submissions twice—first very quickly to get a general sense of the submitted works, then again much more slowly looking at and considering each submission carefully.

Even at a cursory glance, however, Alfen’s submissions—Dancer (2005) and Falling Man— possessed undeniable gravity and weightiness that pulled me in. Falling Man is a sculpture of a nude male that is anything but classical in the formal sense of the word. Two back-to-back anterior sides of a man comprise this figure. Both halves of his body—the front, and, the front—are formed of concave and convex curves. The curves that form the body tussle and meld together with the tight and taut musculature of the abdomen and limbs suggesting a resistant and heavy fall or drop. The figure itself is bent, and could be read as being concave or convex (forward or backwards). Or, it could be interpreted as being both concave and convex.

How do we decipher this enigmatic work that is both so simple and still such a puzzle? Formally it embodies and expresses duality and oneness; it is literally a figure that is divided yet one. The title and the physical pose of the work seem to suggest a man caught in a balletic stumble—seemingly in a futile yet instinctive attempt to break a fall, a fall that was perhaps not inevitable but impossible to stop once set in motion. And what of the curves? Do they signify the inner contradictions, conflicts, or struggles within oneself? Or, are they simply a convention created by Alfen to convey and accentuate the movement of a rotating body as it falls through the air? As with all great works of art, Falling Man succeeds in deeply engaging a viewer and evoking more questions than answers.

I do not have any definitive answers to my questions. However, since awarding Alfen for Falling Man in HMA’s open juried show, I have had the fortune to view his other sculptures. The formal aspects of Falling Man and its core characteristics are consistent throughout his other figural sculptures—duality and oneness, and an uncertain tension both within the figure and between the figure and its surrounding. I hope that seeing and engaging with the works in this exhibition will offer us the opportunity to further ponder the questions Alfen poses through his art.

Judy Kim — Director, Affiliates and Abu Dhabi Project Operations at the Guggenheim Museum