Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is pleased to present Keep Your Eyes Open, an exhibition featuring a series of new sculptural works by Andreas Kocks. In his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Kocks carefully chooses materials and forms that reflect a balance of elements and activate space in relation to the viewer.  

Kocks’ practice involves cutting, layering and shaping metals and paper to form structured lines that activate light and shadow. Fascinated by the intersection of drawing and sculpture, the line is a crucial part of Kocks’ work. More than a mere mark, Kocks wields his materials to turn a drawn line into a physical gesture, transforming the solid form to create cutouts, hollowed spaces, and warped three dimensional structures. This equality of positive and negative, convex and concave, is essential to Kocks’ practice, reflecting the tension that is inherent to creating works of metal and paper structures.

Through this use of metal, Kocks’ expands the possibility of a traditional wall hanging, allowing the works to merge with the environment and for the wall to become a part of the composition of each piece. For example, some of his pieces have polished, mirrorlike surfaces, allowing the surrounding space to be reflected in the sculpture. His use of watercolor paper offers a similar opportunity. Kocks delicately builds up layers of paper that rest upon one another, carving lines and shapes that create pockets of shadow, warping as the location and surrounding light changes. In some works, Kocks even places parts of the piece detached from the main structure, with single elements literally jumping out of the constraints of the frame. 

In Keep Your Eyes Open, Kocks creates a dialogue between the artwork, the viewer, and the space that they are in. Each material is carefully chosen to engage negative spaces and surrounding frameworks, thus drawing the viewer in closer, creating a deep relationship to locality that is present in each piece.

Born in Oberhausen, Germany, Andreas Kocks received his MFA in sculpture from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His work has been featured in museum exhibitions worldwide including the Museum of Art and Design in New York, Manchester Art Museum, England, the Museum August-Macke-Haus in Bonn, Haus der Kunst Munich, Germany, and the Kerawa Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland. In 2006 Kocks was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation fellowship. In 2010 and 2011 he was a lecturing artist at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste, France, and in Atlanta and Savannah, GA. He has received numerous commissions from private and public clients, and his work has been written about in numerous publications, including Art in America, Architectural Digest, Kunstforum, Time Out, Platinum Magazine and the Financial Times. After living in New York for over a decade, Andreas is currently living and working in Munich, Germany.