Laurenz Stockner’s Objects Between Matter, Process, and Form to experience in an exhibition high in the Mountains of Val Gardena in Italy

Stockner approaches them with the curiosity of a craftsman and the persistence of a researcher, testing their limits and allowing their physical properties to shape the work.

The exhibition SPUREN (‚traces‘), presented at the cultural centre Tublà da Nives, brings together several bodies of work made from different materials for the first time. In the four distinctive rooms of the exhibition space, set within the dramatic alpine landscape of Selva di Val Gardena in Italy, Stockner’s works unfold as a continuous investigation into where craft ends, and sculpture begins – and whether such a boundary is necessary at all.

At the core of this investigation is the vessel. One of the most elementary forms created by human beings, the vessel occupies an ambiguous position: it is both object and metaphor, something made to contain and something that has long served as a figure for the human body. Stockner strips the vessel of much of its conventional functionality. What remains is a fundamental form through which material, process and transformation can come into focus. His copper bowls are exemplary in this regard.

The works begin with cement copper from the Aurina Valley, which Stockner processes through a complex sequence of melting operations before transforming it into sheet copper. Only then does the forging begin. The finished bowls therefore contain an entire chain of transformations – extraction, melting, refining, hammering and shaping – condensed into a seemingly simple form.
Their surfaces make this history visible. Cracks, irregularities and marks of working remain present in the copper, whose shifting orange and red tones suggest both geological and temporal depth.

The surface is not merely the skin of the object; it is its record. The history of the material and the history of its making become inseparable. Looking at these bowls means, in a sense, looking backwards through the finished form towards the processes that produced it.


Bowls, 2026, Prettau copper, smelted, forged, raised. Photo: private.


Bowls, 2021, Prettau copper, smelted, forged, hammered, photo: Jürgen Eheim


This relationship between material and time becomes almost kinetic in the copper bowls Elastic Form, a series Stockner has developed since 2008. Twenty-one bowls made from extremely thin copper are brought together on a single platform.

Set in motion by the slightest currents of air, they are in a state of continuous, subtle movement. Each bowl responds in its own way, according to its size and material thickness: some oscillate gently, while others tremble or quiver. Together, their individual movements form a delicate choreography, in which the particular properties of each bowl become visible. Here, copper – conventionally associated with solidity, durability and weight – reveals an unexpected elasticity. The effect is disarming.

What appears to be an object becomes an event. Form is no longer fixed but continuously articulated through the interaction between material and environment. The transparent architecture of the exhibition space intensifies this impression, allowing the bowls to appear suspended between stillness and movement.


Installation: Soffio, 2026, copper. Photo: Katherina Perlongo.


A markedly different presence emerges in the works made from tin. In contrast to the delicacy and apparent weightlessness of the copper bowls, the tin forms appear heavier, denser and more grounded. The material is recovered from old everyday objects and organ pipes and subsequently transformed through sand casting. The casting technique itself reaches back to Stockner’s training as a goldsmith in Florence, where he learned casting as part of his jewellery education.

His formative years in Florence, including his studies with Manfred Bischoff, played an important role in shaping his ongoing engagement with experimentation and material, and were a formative part of his artistic education. In his new series PLANA, Stockner's vessel undergoes a transformation. No longer primarily vertical containers, the forms extend horizontally across the plinth, closer to relief than vessel. Their surfaces rise and sink, producing cavities, ridges and undulations that evoke topographies. They seem less like containers than traces impressed into a landscape.

That landscape is not incidental. Stockner grew up in the mountains and continues to live and work within them. The geological formations suggested by the tin works resonate with the physical environment surrounding the exhibition itself. The whole room becomes, in turn, a kind of landscape: the works lead the viewer from the low relief-like forms towards taller structures, as though moving through a valley and gradually entering the mountains. Two stacked steel vessels stand at the culmination of this movement. Their forms recall storage containers, objects whose purpose is to preserve and hold. Yet their functionality is deliberately disrupted. One can be opened; the other cannot. The distinction is slight but fundamental. By withholding access to the interior, Stockner removes the vessel’s practical purpose and allows it to exist solely as form.


Left: Exhibition view, 2026; right: Vessels „Hyle“, 2025, turned steel, melted, heat-scaled. Photo: Katherina Perlongo.


The steel works of Hyle approach the material from another direction. Here, fire becomes the decisive agent. The steel is heated until it reaches the point of melting, and the solidified material retains the evidence of this passage between states. The works register a transformation that is not entirely resolved: solid becomes liquid and solid again, raw matter becomes worked matter and then seems to return to an elemental state.

What interests Stockner is not the polished result of transformation but the trace of transformation itself – the moment in which material appears caught between states.


Double Vessel: Hyle, 2025, steel, milled, melted. Photo: Jürgen Eheim.


Even the smallest works in the exhibition continue this investigation. Two delicate silver vessels were produced during an Ashanti casting workshop led by Moritz Ganzoni in spring 2026.

Emerging from a centuries-old casting tradition, they function as experiments at a different scale: fragile, precise and open-ended. They also establish a link to Stockner’s origins in jewellery, suggesting that the knowledge acquired through craft does not remain confined to the field of jewellery but continues to migrate into sculpture and material experimentation.

Across SPUREN, Stockner’s objects resist being understood simply as finished forms. They are repositories of processes. Their surfaces, movements, distortions and fractures make visible the forces that have acted upon them. What appears to be a vessel, a bowl or a sculpture is also a material history – a condensation of fire, pressure, gravity, labour and time. The trace is therefore not something added to the work. It is central part of the work.



Laurenz Stockner SPUREN
12.9. – 11.10.2026
Curated by Katherina Perlongo
Tublà da Nives Str. Nives 6 I-39048 Selva di Val Gardena
www.tubladanives.it/de/index

 

About the author

Katherina Perlongo is a Berlin-based curator working at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and design. Her practice engages with materiality, making, and the stories embedded in objects. Drawn to the tactile and the handmade, she traces the lives of objects and the people behind them. Through exhibitions and writing, she weaves connections between materials, makers, and audiences.

instagram.com/ktxlongo/
bio.site/katherinaperlongo



Credit portrait photo: Necklace by Silke Spitzer, photo: Eric Tschernow.