Berthold Horbelt

Wolfgang Winter and Berthold H‡rbelt use plastic bottle-crates as their main structural material, transforming a banal, familiar and generally neglected item of our commercial and transportation landscape into a versatile building block. Their "box houses" can be found throughout the world: plastic public seating areas await loiterers in the parks and city streets of Hokkaido, Freiburg, Liverpool, Frankfurt, New York State and Houston; a plastic lighthouse stands bright on a rock island in Sweden; and plastic pavilions provide information access and rest/reading rooms at exhibitions like Skulptur: Projekte in Mnster and the 1999 Venice Biennale. But Winter and H‡rbelt's oeuvre is not just boxes. The artists have created useful, breathable structures from metal mesh (the gratings used for scraping dirty shoes), building a ticket booth in the Hamburger Kunsthalle; and their humorous cast objects and play structures provide some of the most accessible, pleasurable, creative explorations of sculpture today.