At the Lechner Museum in Ingolstadt, Germany, the exhibition "Materie Stahl" reframes the legacy of Alf Lechner through a lens that feels both urgent and overdue.
Far from treating steel as inert matter to be molded, Lechner elevated it to a co-authorial role—an agent with its own expressive vocabulary. This retrospective traces that evolving relationship, offering a portrait not of domination over material, but of collaboration, resistance, and contingency.
The raw heft of steel becomes, in Lechner’s hands, a register of artistic tension—visible in fractures, oxidations, and resistant forms that refuse to be tamed. Particularly in his late work, the metal emancipates itself from its traditional role, asserting a sculptural language that’s at once physical and philosophical. This shift from control to dialogue is not merely aesthetic—it encapsulates a broader transformation in postwar sculpture, from the rigid modernist canon to a more pluralistic, process-based ethos.
Housed within a former factory—a poignant counterpoint to Lechner’s industrial materiality—the Lechner Museum serves as both shrine and laboratory. Here, his dialogue with material is not hermetic but open-ended, set against international figures like Richard Serra, Charlotte Posenenske, and Dadamaino. These juxtapositions underscore the social and aesthetic stakes of material in contemporary art: its labor histories, its formal limits, and its latent poetics.
