ato-klaus, Branches & Bones, "Transforming the Form" by Dominique Magada, 2016

Klaus Mertens, a German artist and former masterstudent of Georg Baselitz, has been working in Ethiopia since 2007, a country which has proven to be an immense source of inspiration for his work. In the land of the Lion of Juddah, he shifted from printmaking and pictorial representations to the exploration of space and shapes, creating objects with new forms and functions. To do so, the artist is using all sorts of unconventional material found locally such as animal bones, dead trees or even plastic shopping bags; in short, objects that are regarded as waste.

When Klaus first moved to Addis Ababa, he was struck by the way animals were treated: carcasses and skulls helplessly lying on the side of the street, waiting for scavengers to dispose of them. Travelling and hiking in this beautiful country, he also became aware of the destruction of landscape by deforestation. This lack of respect for nature became an obsessive issue for him and one of the main themes expressed in his recent artwork. To this end, the artist is using animals' skulls and bones in an attempt to give them a new lease of life and a different meaning through his compositions. Deconstructing perceptions, materials and meanings is an important part of Klaus work to transform the experience and transcend the form.

One of his powerful pieces is the Bremer Stadtmusikanten - a composition of nine painted sheep and goat skulls mounted on a stick.

It is an attempt to impart to the animals the soul that was taken away from them. Now the animals seem to be back to occupy a space that wasn't designated for them originally like in the well-known fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, The musicians of Bremen. However, in the fairy tale the animals succeed in escaping death by leaving the old farm -where death was their destiny- to start a glorious new life as musicians in the free city of Bremen. The Bremer Stadtmusikanten created by Klaus also overcame their cruel death and hardship through the transformation of their form; they are now back to affect us with their silent but disturbing presence.

Bones are also used in the sculpture Reconstructed part of Lucy's cave: here, cow bones were repainted and assembled to symbolise the cave of Lucy, the first ever found biped in Africa. The original skeleton is one of the historical treasures of the National Museum of Ethiopia. Klaus's reconstructed cave of Lucy looks like a shelter but is simultanuously open to movement like an imaginary animal reincarnated in a heap of animal bones. When juxtaposed to his lithography series of donkeys heads, the bones of the sculpture seem alive again. Like a wild animal ready for another life.

His piece Hypoxylon Addis also deals with the treatment of nature. But this time, Klaus is using multicolored branches and twigs. By painting in different colors the broken branches depossessed of their vitality and reorganizing them as an organic sculpture, they once again become light and aerial. The relationship between mankind and nature is revealed through the work: human beings forcefully imposing their will on nature. The same idea is found in his art piece True to nature where Klaus recreated a false tree with

Knitted Egg, a round, almost egg-shaped sculpture is made of many tree branches knitted together and painted in white. The knitting is so delicate that the piece reminds us of a fixed and solid snowflake, which is a contradiction in itself as the very nature of a snowflake is to be light and ephemeral. Like a snowflake, the Knitted Egg has just fallen on the ground, but it will not melt, it will stay there to remind us of our wasteful habits, our almost automatic reaction of throwing things away - things we no longer need - without further consideration or respect. By re-using material and re-shaping it, Klaus Mertens injects new life into his objects.

Using a different medium, the artist is also making suits from recycled plastic bags, specifically chosen for the internationally recogniseable brand printed on them. By putting them together as new outfits, he is twisting the very idea of a label, suggesting that it is enought to wear the actual brand name rather than the clothes made under that brand. He is thus producing new clothes with their own label created from universally identifiable ones. Consumers no longer need to buy clothes from a given brand, they just need to buy the name printed on them. Like in the fairy tale The Emperor's new clothes, what we think we wear is more important than what we are wearing in reality:

Connecting cultures

Before becoming an artist, Klaus studied architecture in Berlin. He concentrated on the ideas of the Bauhaus School, which was initially developed in Germany in the 1920s. The Bauhaus movement aimed at combining architecture, crafts and fine arts, without class or discipline distinction and became particularly famous for the design of modern furniture, according to their principle of harmony between form and function. In the Ato Goethe Collection, Klaus is revisiting the Bauhaus principles by creating sculptures with a specific function. Again with a recycling concern in mind, he re-used the discarded wooden floor of the Goethe Institute in Addis Ababa and cutting the wood with computerized technology, he was able to re-assemble the old planks to create new shapes that can be in turn a sculpture, a table or both together. Carrying the traces of all the people who walked on that floor before, the new furniture also embodies the ideas of the German Bauhaus: square, rectangle or oblong and standing on cast iron legs, they are form and function at once. A cultural cross-over project.

Before moving to Ethiopia and while still in Germany, Klaus had developed a series of woodcut prints, a technique he highly appreciated after being taught by Georg Baselitz in the 1980s in Berlin. In his own series Woodcut tattoo, enlarged parts of the human body are depicted covered with dotted and lined tattoos. Looking at them with "Ethiopian eyes", they strangely remind us of the body paint performed by the people of the Omo Valley. Long before Klaus moved to Addis, Ethiopia had cast a spell on him. "Those prints have come home," one of his Ethiopian friends and fellow painter told him.

If Ethiopia was Klaus Mertens destiny, his current mission is to connect the European and the African arts. He is doing so literally by teaching sculpture at Addis Ababa University's Alle School of Fine Arts.