At first glance, Iris Kettner's life-size figurative sculptures appear to represent familiar-seeming, often humble figures of urban life. Shaped from tattered old clothes wrapped around wooden structures with adhesive tape and dressed in fragments of used clothes, these figures project a sense of inconspicuousness and anonymity, an impression only reinforced by their covered heads and masked faces. On closer inspection, however, the impression of familiarity is replaced by one of confusion: Kettner is not simply interested in staging figurative sculptures as those average types that are mostly overlooked. She exaggerates their inconspicuousness by subtracting any individualizing or characteristic features. Her figures appear as prototypes of a uniform physical mass, evoking the undifferentiated existence that prevails in late capitalist societies.

The artist's focus on this very mass, which seems to be growing constantly in the 21st century, is explosively powerful in contemporary society, a fact which is consistently confirmed by people's reactions when they encounter Kettner's sculptures, some of which she presents in public places. The figures for her project "Superheroes" were installed for four weeks at Berlin's Alexanderplatz station on the U2 line. Positioned on benches or against pillars on the platforms, they assumed the effect of living passers-by. Their masked faces and their rather meagre clothing prompted people to approach them with interest, but also with aggression and violence. Evidently, the permanent, motionless presence of anonymized ordinary types in a public space called to mind the persistence, purposefully suppressed by the media, of social grievances, as well as the class-transcending problem of social failure, and this could not remain uncommented upon.

Iris Kettner: Man, 2005

clothes, shoes, textiles, tape, wood construction, lifesize (height 60 cm)

Its threatening, ever-present potential is symbolically encapsulated by Kettner's "Rosa Tier" ("Pink Animal"). This figure, which crouches on the ground wearing a pink animal mask and only partly clothed in a white bathrobe, and whose inner life, formed of tattered old clothes, is made visible in its feet, hands, forearms and head, resembles a demon, an 'animal-headed chimera', which - entirely in the sense of the original Greek word (greek daimon) - accompanies people everywhere, unseen, as a power of fate or destiny.

Kettner's figures from the "M" (Madonnas) series present young women in trendy, cheap, department-store clothing, carrying babies on their arms. The intimate closeness between mother and child forms a certain contrast with the demonstrative styling of the mothers, which signals a readiness to fight, or an erotic encounter. These opposites show the contradictions between vulnerability and aggression, and between submissiveness and dominance, as they play out in the behaviour of the powerless failures of society. Yet the women's maternal function, which references Christian iconography both in title and composition, grants them what is almost a sacred valorisation: motherhood is staged as something holy in itself.

Margit im Schlaa