“IMAGINE” at Kunstraum Heilig Geist: Make it simple but significant

Yves Scherer’s new exhibition “IMAGINE” at Kunstraum Heilig Geist at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Zollverein in Essen presents his sculptural universe at its most tender and introspective. Moving between digital longing and quiet physical presence, his works unfold with a subtle emotional charge that resists spectacle. In this conversation with Stavroula Coulianidis, published as excerpts from “Yves Scherer Sculpture” (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2025), Scherer reflects on the evolution of his practice. He traces a path from early post-internet figuration to a more restrained, almost devotional approach to form. What emerges is an artist deeply invested in sincerity, softness, and the interior life of objects. “IMAGINE” becomes not just an exhibition, but a lens through which this shift feels both inevitable and quietly transformative.

Yves Scherer, Imagine, 2025, Kunstraum Heilig Geist am UNESCO-Welterbe Zollverein, Photo by James Rodemann, Courtesy of the artist

Stravoula Coulianidis: Since this is a book on sculpture, I think it would make sense to talk about your thoughts on sculpture as a medium, and how it differs from other mediums—say painting?

Yves Scherer: To me the most fundamental difference between painting
and sculpture is that sculpture shares our physical reality so to say, while I think painting creates and exists in a pictorial space. Every sculpture has to compete with a chair or a lamp as just another real-world object, for painting I think that is different. Even though the history of painting over the past hundred years could be retold in parts as a long move away from thinking of paintings as illusionary space by putting an increasing emphasis on its object hood, our relationship to paintings is still similar to one we have with our phones or a TV—it’s less about what they are on a physical level, but about what they contain. D.H. Lawrence famously said about Cézanne, that he made us aware that matter really exists, outside of human perception. That is how I feel about sculpture, even a blind person can see it so to speak. And while paintings have a dedicated space in the world—they hang on the walls, sculpture, at least the kind that I’m engaged in, does not have a space in the world. In some way one could argue that they take our space. That they are quite literally there instead of us.

SC: Do you see yourself as a sculptor?

YS: I have always understood myself as mainly an artist, and within that as a sculptor only if I’m put on the spot. At the same time I do think that sculpture has always had a special position in my work, it’s the medium that I feel most comfortable in and the most connected to. I sometimes wonder about the reasons for that—today I think that one
reason could be that I don’t have a traditional art education and sculpture from early on always felt more welcoming and less charged and judgmental than drawing and painting. Painting has this very specific history and knowledge, it’s art with a capital A. And even after all this time there still is this relationship with skill and talent. I really
never had any artistic skill or talent to speak of, and in sculpture that was easier to hide.

SC: The book covers sculptures from 2013 to 2025. Are the earliest works in the book your first sculptures or was there something that came before?

YS: I see my very first sculptures as these rabbit traps that I made when I was a literature student in Berlin, around 2010/11. I was having some personal difficulties, and following the advice of a fatherly friend I tried to turn my spiritual fate around by catching some city rabbits. The
background here is that my Chinese zodiac sign is that of a rabbit, and the year of the rabbit was coming up, so I wanted to get ahead of it. To make a long story short I never caught a rabbit, but somehow building these traps made me interested in leaving my writing ambitions behind, and to focus on making things in the real world instead. Step by step I took a studio and got more professionalized, and then had my first solo-exhibition titled Evolution and Comfort in London early 2013. For this show I made a transparent water tank sculpture/object out of 40mm
thick plexiglass. It was a sort of vertical aquarium that was filled with water and leaned against the wall, installed in a long space with only a photograph of my then girlfriend on Skype a few meters behind it on the wall.

SC: Yes I have seen a picture of this installation, and remem- ber you showing the work in New York in a different context later on. What does it mean to you?

YS: My good friend Markus Selg pointed out that the sculpture must be a stand in for the computer screen, since my girlfriend and me were living in a long distance relationship between Berlin and London at the time. It was so surprising to me that I could not see this basic truth
in the composition even though I had been working on this installation for months. Making art is often just a funny way of pulling one’s subconscious inside out and then presenting in a gallery space, which I think is actually quite a cleansing process. It’s the reason that I feel like as an artist one is quite in tune with one’s inner life. One can just externalize it in some way, and then move on. But on a conceptual level the work was probably influenced by the formaldehyde tanks of Damien Hirst and release of the first iPhone during that time.

SC: What came after this exhibition?

YS: I became interested in figurative sculpture and started exploring different ways of making them. I think the first figurative work that I made was right after this show in London and in some way was the other side of that screen I discussed—in that it shows the person in front of it. The work was a self-portrait made of a down jacket that is
stuck in an empty desktop computer tower, the object people used to have in offices and homes below the desk before Laptops. The jacket is arranged or draped to look like there is an actual person in the jacket, so that the mental picture that is created is of someone actually living in the computer, or being stuck in a computer. Art doesn’t translate too well into language, so it sounds silly here. But as a sculpture I think it was formally quite interesting and successful. I later scanned this work and had it cast it in plaster, which totally changed the character of it. I showed the plaster cast on a little rabbit fur for my degree show in 2014.

SC: Was it at this time that the celebrity figures came into your sculptural practice as well?

YS: It was in that same period, exactly. I had moved from Berlin to London in 2012 for my Masters at the Royal College of Art, and the workshops there allowed me to try some new and more elaborate fabrication methods than I had used before. The first work I made there was a life-sized Emma Watson sculpture CNC-milled out of one solid block of Swiss pear wood. It took weeks to first program and then mill it, and I left it just like it came out of the machine. The only thing I added to the figure was this silver hedgehog necklace, because I had read online somewhere that it was her favorite animal. Since there was no other finishing or sanding, one can still see the way the robot was programed, the tracks it was running along and where it couldn’t quite get to etc. I find that quite beautiful.

SC: Where did this work come from? What was the world like for you in 2014?

YS: On a personal level, going back to what I said above, it came at at time when I was living in a long distance relationship, maybe feeling a bit lonely and spending a lot of time on my computer. On a societal scale I think the internet was still somehow new, especially social media, and there was this broader cultural shift towards life spent online, and the alienation that comes from it. It was also the time of the “dark web” with Silk Road and new online forums such as 4chan. There was a series of hacks targetingcelebrity phones which resulted in leaked private imagery— what you would call “nudes” today, and a lot of them
were fake. Living in London and being a Harry Potter fan, I was particularly interested in the attention that Emma Watson got online. I found it interesting to create a work that picked up on this contemporary moment, to reflect on this new character of the internet loner, but to address it within the traditional medium of figurative sculpture. I thought of Pinocchio and how one can now create a companion out of nothing by 3d printing or in my case milling it out wood. In an art historical sense it also aligned with this burgeoning movement in young art that came to be labeled as “Post-Internet” art, where people were interested in somehow bringing digital matter into physical space, or at least bridging the two worlds via objects in the real world beyond just phones and screens.

SC: Wasn’t there an online backlash from your Emma Watson works?

YS: Yes I presented a group of these sculptures with an Emma Watsons face but with fantasy bodies in my first major gallery show at Guido W. Baudach in Berlin 2014. The figures were in the nude with short hair, crossed legs and only their hands covering their breasts. The show got
some positive press coverage, which I think then came to the attention of a feminist Facebook group and some young London artists in specific. They took offense in the work and accused me of objectifying the female figure. I was called a misogynist, had magazines call me for comments and then fairs, exhibitions and sales canceled because of it. I would almost say that I was canceled before that was even a thing yet.

SC: How did you respond to this?

YS: I focused more on myself I think, and maybe lost a bit of my youthful energy at the same time. Shortly after my exhibition at Guido’s I moved to New York and did my first exhibition here at the Swiss Institute in 2015. The show was framed as a fictitious Honey Moon between a mermaid Emma Watson and me, and followed by an exhibition in Mexico in 2016 for which I created this stalker persona
obsessed with Kristen Stewart and Twilight. As a result of my move to New York maybe, and some other changes in my personal life, this fan fiction and celebrity part of my work slowly lost some of its relevance and interest to me. I tried to make work that was more personal and maybe more universal in subject matter at the same time. In 2017 I made an exhibition titled Single which had a picture of myself in the nude as an invite, and mainly consisted of ready-made sculptures of myself, sort of domesticobjects-assemblages. After that I did a show series called Primal in 2018 that presented very simplified, almost
pre-historic wooden figures. I combined these with a lifesized wooden Legolas sculpture, which I made after leaked nude images of Orlando Bloom appeared online. So the the celebrity aspect never fully went away, I just started to juxtapose it with other elements.

SC: Yes one can see a shift in focus towards the male figure in this period, I’m thinking about the Legolas you mentioned, but also the pink Vincent figure and the self-portrait titled Boy.

YS: Totally. In 2019 I did a show called Boys for which I made a plaster self-portrait of myself as a little boy based on a family video. In some way this was in response to the cultural climate of #metoo at the time, but it then also led me to the explore other elements of my past and the cultural archetypes that I grew up with. It led me to make the country boy plucking flowers next, and then the Snowman with the hearts as well as some of the new animal sculptures. Most recently I started combining all these figures into larger groups, which is something that keeps me busy and really excited today.

SC: The first time I saw a group like this was in Los Angeles earlier this year for your exhibition Another Day in Paradise. There was a very large Aluminium sculpture that I had seen before in Mexico, which is the first work one encounters in this book. Could you explain to me where something like this sits within the trajectory you just this? Would you say this is a reflection on masculinity also, maybe in response to the cultural climate that you just described?

YS: The work you mention is titled Day and Night and I made the first iteration of it in 2021 for an exhibition in Mexico titled Eternity. In some way it is a reflection on masculinity which has been an interest of mine from the beginning and I guess heightened with the climate you describe. But I think this specific work comes without any feeling of guilt. I see it as an exploration of the relationship between softness and strength, much beyond the current moment I hope. What I see in the work is an oversized dandelion flower that props up a muscular Greek or Roman hero figure which is missing a leg. The flower is draped
around the torso so that it becomes the missing leg that the figure is precariously leaning on. I see the two elements as forming this fragile unit, but at the same time I could imagine them walking away together like this, him using the flower as a sort of crotch. I find it very poetic and nice how they together manage to defy the gravitational pull, which
is sort of the cleansing force of any standing sculpture.

SC: Flowers seem to be a recurring motif within your sculptural practice over the last few years. There is a flower on the cover of this book. What is the significance of flowers for you?

YS: It differs. In the case of this work we just spoke about, the flower represents things like beauty or poetry or art in my mind, without wanting to load too much onto the work by saying this. I mean that it stands for what contrasts with the physical strength of the figure, but still supports it if that makes sense. In some other works the flower is personified I would say, even the next work where there are two flowers growing out of a concrete block. To me they become almost like figures, I see them as a couple that is flirting with each other in some way.
It’s this little moment of tenderness in a slightly hostile environment that I like about it. And then in some later works like in Laetitia, the flower to me represents a person outside of the arrangement. For this
figure the large flower is turned towards the woman and then child as if it was given to them.

SC: This moment of tenderness and this feeling of intimacy for me really is at the core of your work, it’s what makes something feel like an Yves Scherer work to me.

YS: I’m glad to hear that. Damien Hirst speaks about having to make a fly piece after making a spot painting, just to balance the sort of good with the bad, the pretty with the ugly. I never had it like that. I like to make things that make you feel good, things that give you a deep and
hopefully warm feeling. In driving school you learn that if you look at the tree you will hit it, I think that is a good strategy for life also. If you want to be a happy person, think happy thoughts. The world moves by positive action not negative thought, so I really try to be engaged in the former 248

SC: Would you say that is the purpose of art?

YS: I would need to think more about that. When it comes to the purpose of art, I often think about this quote by Gerhard Richter, who said that “art brushes the dust of the everyday”, which I find very beautiful and right. It can touch on the silly as well as the essential parts of the human experience, but in a way that is pure and complete. What I mean is that the world is always perfect within a work of art, not in a moral sense, but more in the way that a given moment can also be perfect. It’s like cleaning up your house, which gives you that one moment of enlightenment when things are all in place. Or that one first
breath of clean air when you step out in the morning, or looking at your kid when it sleeps or moves in a cute way. Art is exactly like this moment, but it never ends. It’s eternally perfect.

SC: Eternally perfect is how some people may describe Switzerland. You sometimes say that your work is not about fantasy but about presenting an idealized reality, which makes me think of your upbringing. How did growing up in Switzerland influence your work? And how does it contrast with your experience in New York?

YS: I think it was Andy Warhol who said “Switzerland is great, it’s finished”. Which I think is a very interesting observation. My one friend always says about New York— it will be great once it’s finished. Which obviously it will never be. I’m not sure if this really captures anything at
all, but it’s easier to do things in New York. Someone once wrote about my work that “Nothing glamorous ever came from Switzerland,” which I think is an interesting observation. In Switzerland the ultimate achievement and thing another person could say about you, is that you are normal. It’s the absolute peak of Swiss-ness and the real ingredient if you want to belong—is not to stand out. As a young person I think this can feel limiting and disempowering. But the older I get the more I value the understatement and also the social cohesion in some way. There is a true sense of quality and people care about doing the
right thing and about doing things right. I appreciate that today.

SC: Do you see this in your sculptures as well?

YS: What I can see is that my work used to be much more loud and American while I was in Europe and much more Swiss since now that I’m in New York. Today I’m interested in making figures that are centered within themselves, not looking for attention or reliant on an audience or other people. The best I can hope for is to imbue them with a kind spirit, to put a little fire in their hearts. I read something the other day about monasteries, and how some of them are spectacularly modest. I really like that expression and idea, it’s something I strive towards. Maybe it’s my protestant upbringing but I do find true joy and beauty in restraint. I think the spirit lives in simple things. As Carl
Jung famously said, “if you are looking for god and haven‘t found him yet, you are not looking low enough.”

SC: Thinking about high and low here, there are some sculptures in this book that look almost as if they were made with some discarded things that you found around the studio— some of them with a ready-made character, or then these very simple almost archaic figures from your Primal show cycle, but then on the other side you have these highly produced shiny stainless steel and bronze works. How do you square this?

YS: In my mind the genuine opportunity of art is to speak about the things which don’t change over time. Art doesn’t get better with time, it’s not like technology where there is some kind of development and a strong notion of progress. I don’t think art gets better or worse. If I think about a person in a cave, they would carve a figure out of a piece
of rock or bone that might look quite similar to my onyx works. And in spirit and function it is probably pretty close to what I described with the Emma Watson work above—as in the first human carving themselves a friend or thinking about someone they saw in the forest. What I mean here is even though the Emma Watson work is extremely specific, and it took 2000 years of recorded cultural history to get to a place where all these references are in places, and where the technology exist to make it in such a realistic manner by a machine, to me it is no different than a piece of driftwood that barely resembles a figure at all. I’m interested in the whole spectrum of figuration, and think that especially the combination of these different forms, expressions and materials are thrilling to me. While there is a technological graveyard
for a lot of things that came in between, I would say that the earliest human artistic expression can still be as valid and meaningful as anything great made today. Art is like a perpetuum mobile that gives endless energy once it’s created, without ever losing any. Forever.