With his still-life performances, the German artist Johan Lorbeer seems to unhinge the laws of gravity. For hours on time, he remains, as a living work of art, in physically impossible positions. Elevated or reduced to the state of a sculpture, he interacts with the bewildered and irritated audience, whose appetite for communication rises as time goes by, often culminating in the wish to touch the artist in his superhuman, angelic appearance in order to participate in his abilities.
Since the end of the ’70s of the past century, he has been raising attention in the art world with his work in the dynamic area of friction between act and sculpture. In the “Proletarisches Wandbild“ (Proletarian Wall Image), a reflexion on the well-known “Proletarisches Standbild“ (Proletarian Still Image) at times of the DDR, Lorbeer, dressed in a Berlin street sweeper’s crude-orange work uniform, stands motionlessly out of the wall at a 90-degree-angle on a height of approximately 3 metres.
“The binman is a sign of urbanity. His field of work is the floor. He stands in everyone’s service. He is of service to everyone. In the “Proletarisches Wandbild“, remaining vertically against the wall is a physical impossibility or at least only thinkable for an even more elusive instant. My point of view standing on the wall acts normally; that is to say vertically. The optical perception redefines the wall as the floor, which is why from my position I perceive the observers as positioned against the wall.“ (Johan Lorbeer)