With her art, Gesine Grundmann questions the environments our civilization creates. For the most part, her pieces can be considered to belong in the artistic genres of sculpture and installation, but they can also involve painting and photographic techniques as well as writing and text. She is a sculptor and a conceptual artist, but her contributions also place her, at least in a broader sense, among the ranks of the archeologists and sociologists. Despite the intentions of her individual works being very diverse, her role is always the same: she dissects her subject matter in a very hands-on way, defining it in its constitution, then references something outside of it in realizing the pieces. Her interest in objects and found phenomena, even in as it were the obsolete leftovers you might encounter in a home environment and nature, finds expression in the special way in which she engages with materials. Gesine Grundmann simulates reality and its particles through her approach to surfaces and the nuanced hues they exhibit, their consistency and texture, often expressed as a serial structure.

Her method is consistent. For her exhibition at Städtischer Kunstraum Dusseldorf in 2005 she was already working in this vein. There, a fairly naturalistic depiction of a fireplace as one would find in traditional home environments took center stage. Assembled from several parts, the piece conveys a cozy, homely atmosphere. Every part is in the right place, it looks 'built'. A grid is installed in front of the opening to the flue in the lower area. The board concluding the piece at the top is reminiscent of a flickering TV screen and conjures up connotations of a roof covered in moss. On the other hand it can also simply be read as what it is: an abstract painting with alternating color fields carried out in thick paint (1) which, being propped up as it is against the wall, achieves sculptural qualities. As a whole, the fireplace is carefully organized down to the last detail. An echo of the tiled stripe forming the rectangular framing of the grid can be found in the tiled outer hearth projecting into the room. The tiled jamb area in turn forms a compact shape together with the dark surrounding wooden elements. The rustic coffer field carries an inscription in a sober, modern, black typeface: "Wessen Probleme möchte ich eigentlich haben?" – whose problems would I actually like to have? The title here points the viewer to the scent of a possible interrelationship between luxury, wellness and psychological fragility. The surfaces convey different haptic stimuli, while the grid becomes a membrane between inside and outside. The piece can be read as an indirect, symbolic metaphor for human existence.

Whenever Gesine Grundmann uses text as a formal element of her work, she employs a sober typeface that makes the written words appear somewhat dispassionate. This stands in contrast to the actual statements made, which are often touching and sometimes touch on taboos and individuality: "Landschaft with to fuck" (made of the cheap materials cardboard and masking tape, 2002), "das Land der Großen Mutter" (written on the slanted wall of the exhibition space and shown in combination with a video of riding cowboys; with Caterine Val, 2003); "I'm a Tiger" (stained onto sheepskin, 2006); "Sind Ichs / Ist Wirs / Bin Dus" (carved into a slab of travertine, 2007). Gesine Grundmann instigates controversial scenes by fusing subject and object.

Shown alongside "Wessen Probleme möchte ich eigentlich haben?" in the early exhibition in Düsseldorf was an elongated, panoramic object, fairly ambiguous and open to interpretation. The piece in question, "147" is made up of Styrofoam elements boasting wave-shaped surfaces dusted in bright light green and placed loosely on top of each other. Based on the modes of resting, leaning and sliding, its surfaces seem as though having been polished by rushing water; in fact they are very much reminiscent of ragged rock. Depending on the lighting situation, the surfaces glisten in a wonderful range of shades. Calm and restrained sensuality are juxtaposed here to the creaking movement of moraines. Today, Gesine Grundmann's art still operates in this field of ambivalence created by the juxtaposition of built, custom-fit structures and organic matter taken from nature, or reconstructions of the latter. Grundmann distills hill formations from the typology of ashtrays (from 2007). She has placed sandstone boulders, made porous by wind and sea and collected by the artist herself on the coasts of Israel, as a field on a slanted wall (2013). She cast a shell in plastic (acrylic with marble powder mixed into it), but undermined the impression of this material being coquina by leaving red silicone residue on the negative form.(2) She then spliced a chain made from Acrystal that looks like rusty iron onto this shell (2013). But she has also sawed a monumental chain from the trunk of an oak tree, which simultaneously conjures up fetters and jewelry, references growth in its potential for continuation and relates rigidity and liveliness (from 2010). The wooden chains snake across the floor like amphibians. They, too, allude to the destruction of our habitat.

In this aspect they are very much related to her piece "Grosser Rheinischer Tiger" (2007), which melds wildness and 1950s German gemütlichkeit in all its Baroque gravity. The deep black stripes of this 'wall hanging', which is actually made up of skins from sheep of three different races sewn together, allude to the rhythm of prehistoric stone drawings. Or could this be a tally sheet of the 'Rhineland tigers' slain before this animal became extinct? Whatever the case, the illusion of warmth and coziness is rigorously thrust aside in the knowledge of the consequences it has had for evolution (genetic manipulation, extinction): Nothing but lies!

Gesine Grundmann's works harness the atmospheres and auras created by familiar images and tropes firmly lodged in our memory. In order to achieve this, she not only employs a large repertoire of visual experiences, with which she both evokes and undermines realities, but she also works with the potential inherent in nuances of color and modes of presentation. She first installed 'cement wallpaper' on a wall in 2000 for her piece "Betontapete", in which the title describes both the material shown in the piece and the intention behind it. Here, offset prints of close-up photographs of prefabricated slab concrete were pasted directly onto the wall of the exhibition space, thus bringing the outside space into the interior. This in turn is reminiscent of a further piece of hers referencing surface, which features photographs showing a dark green area with holes that pretend to be a starry night sky. The first version of this piece was a canopy (2001).

In these works, Gesine Grundmann wanders, like somnambulist, between realism and abstraction while reflecting mimetic aspects, imitation and disillusionment. At the same time, we can clearly discern her interest in the potentiality of her materials, such as in those instances when a substance in a work feigns being another. Her spectrum encompasses iron, bronze, granite and marble, wood and wool, ceramics and Acrystal, corrugated polyester and Styrofoam, board: namely, 'traditional' natural materials, which are usually crafted by hand and which may prove somewhat unruly, as well as new, chemically produced substances primarily created for industrial processing. It follows that Gesine Grundmann also employs very diverse methods when working, researching and experimenting with them. She then responds to the very surfaces she has herself created and uses coatings that cancel out effects usually associated with the look of the materials used, such as for example absorbing light reflexes.

A further device used is that of allusion. With her "Aschenbecher" series, she has created an immense spectrum of variations while repeating a common set of proportions: the shapes of these objects range from inconspicuous reconstructions to amorphous lumps. She questions the subject matter's very meaning. The ashtray channels a combustion process and gathers its detritus – and in this regard forms a parallel to the previously explored fireplace theme. At the same time, it alludes to cigarettes – in particular as their shape is incorporated in the design of ashtrays by way of an indentation – and in this way kindles emotional associations such as tranquility and painful addiction. By presenting groups of her 'ashtrays' at exhibitions as moving, floating fields, Gesine Grundmann has visualized the ritualization of a social convention. These installations evoke the types of event-like situations where party fittings are needed, without this being given much thought, on whichever surface might be available; at the same time, the works highlight what is special about each of these objects. If we are to pick up individual works from the series, we feel their robust softness and considerable weight. The question of the model (and with it, of dimensions) almost immediately comes to the fore. Some of the 'ashtrays' somehow resemble mountains and craters (3) or stone architectures chiseled out of or built into rock face. It seems as though everything has started slipping in these objects or is in a state of collapse; yet at the same time they give off the impression of having weathered the centuries.

One of the 'ashtrays' bears lighter and darker horizontal bands which, despite being somewhat jagged, bring a zebra hide to mind (2008). But despite this Sixties-inspired look, the structure also points to rock sedimentation. And is this object not also highly evocative of traditional artisanal pottery? In the simulacrum of a vessel (as which, after all, most of the "Aschenbecher" could yet be used) shell and (hollow) core interact. The object's weight correlates with aspects of presence, volume and inspection.

The platinum coated can sculptures titled "Platindosen" – fired, glazed and platinized ceramics – give the impression that here Grundmann revisits the fundamental ideas underlying her 'ashtrays'. In a way, they are each other's counterparts. The communication between inside and outside spaces functions at different levels in the two series. While the 'ashtrays' have evidently been formed by hand, the 'cans' seem anonymous, as though made in mass production by machines. And indeed they are created as negative molds at first, they show the imprints of the inner walls of conventional food cans on their outward skins. With clay shrinking as it dries, these pottered objects can be extracted from the cans after this process has taken place. One of the key aspects the works exhibit – having themselves been created out of a state of openness – is their closed-off nature. Do they have thin walls, containing some content or other, or are they compact mass? The perfection of these 'cans' – and this is another way in which they differ from the 'ashtrays' – makes us shrink back from wanting to touch them: Despite being entirely profane in their block-like Minimalism, they are rather (hermetically) iconic. Their reflective platinum or deep black surfaces make them appear quite exquisite, which is of course entirely contrary to the purpose of storing perishable comestibles. In this case, the flawless horizontal waves are an end in themselves.

Line patterns with grooves and grids then turn out to be a further red thread running through the entirety of Grundmann's oeuvre, one that is potentiated when used in modules, which sometimes leave open the possibility of being continued or added to – in the sense of Brancusi's "Endless Columns" (4). As is the case with a column-shaped piece made up of square polyester cubes. This line of thinking has recently led Gesine Grundmann to create three columns using egg cartons. (5) The differently colored cardboard objects were dipped into liquid binding agent, further intensifying their distinctive hues, before they were stacked with their edges arching outward. The pattern achieved in this way creates a moiré effect, in which our gaze tries to steady itself yet always becomes lost. The columns are a little over 2m in height and with their horizontal stature signalize bodily physicality, notions of stretching upwards and evolvement; they thus demonstrate a successive coming-alive. Once again, Gesine Grundmann transforms profane functional containers into magical objects here, this time into ritually charged steles.

Seriality in the sense of the possibility of continuation also characterizes the works featuring textile strips, which are hung, crossing each other at right angles, on the wall of the exhibition space, thereby activating the gaps between the fabric. Gesine Grundmann cuts these grids from cloth available by the meter and in some cases bearing patterns with a century-old tradition, separating them from the meaning they still held in the manufactories. Yet the resulting art works, which can be read as an ironic commentary on Minimalism, are anything but uniform, if only because the gaps between the threads are populated by a myriad of individual loose threads. The fragility of the fabric strips heightens the impression of the sublime the pieces convey. The shift from a sphere of use value to that of art, carried out with simple means, is perfect: "After all, every checkered fabric contains a grid, and I wanted to free the grid from its fashion aspect." (6) As is the case with the 'cans', the fabric works inverse positive and negative form. This also applies, in a similar way, to the reliefs made of drilled steel workpieces. They are waste products left over from highly precise industrial manufacturing processes and provide the nucleus for new sculptural work. Sorted according to hue and hanging down as protracted, somewhat heavy rolls, the arrangement in rows makes them look somewhat like glittery curtains such as can be found in discos or beach bars, it conjures up jingling sounds. But does the iridescent effect as a seemingly spirited entity moving between surface and space not have something to do with the paintings Gesine Grundmann used in her fireplace piece "Wessen Probleme möchte ich eigentlich haben?", a series which she has carried on to this day? In these paintings, matt and shiny surfaces play a central role, with the latter being created by mixing paint with stone and metal powders.

The repetitive structure as leitmotif in the different work series further heightens the clarity of the presentation. As serial succession – and even as ornamental patterns – it creates, even in abstract works, a great deal of familiarity, based on experiences of primary formulation and deduced from surfaces. "The subconscious in the sense of that which is implied [is] the standard subject of hermeneutic efforts," wrote Hans-Georg Gadamer.(7) In Gesine Grundmann's oeuvre, subliminally contemporary context is turned into texture that submits its object of research to subjective revision: She takes a new look at our living environment and sounds out human-object relationships. In doing so, she reinvents reality in its (supposedly) banal (supposed) implicitness as laconism. By creating reproductions in different materials that enhance our visual and tactile experience or even simply extracting and recombining waste material, she brings substance and structural systematization as semantics into focus. Yet she places the outlier at an auratic distance, as art. Viewed up close, it becomes ever more difficult to see what is real and what is fake and how we should react to the situation. Or, as Jean Baudrillard demanded: "What counts is the poetic uniqueness of the analysis... [a]nd allowing the deception of the world to shine through, which is its mysterious function, the mystification of the world, which is its secret. Whereby the world allows its own deception to shine through – deception, not dissolution of meaning." And Baudrillard concluded: "The absolute rule of thought is to give the world back as we have received it – incomprehensible – and if possible, a bit more so." (8)