Artists

Franz Kapfer

Press release

In architecture, Atlases are generally referred to as muscular, larger-than-life male columnar figures, in reference to Atlas, the titanic sky bearer of Greek mythology. The approximately 1200-year-old, Mesoamerican warriors from Tula, not far from Mexico City, are also interpreted post-Columbian as Atlases, and it is to them in particular that Kapfer makes reference in his exhibition, transferring them to a variety of contemporary weapons and body armour that are standard military equipment today. 
Franz Kapfer adds colourful cutting templates to the objects according to which he made them. They are calibrated to the size of a 4.6 metre tall warrior, a ‘super warrior’, as he winkingly calls his fantasy figure in an interview, for whom these utensils are intended. Kapfer strips his armoury of Atlases of their traditional social connotations with a mixture of an ostensive masculine pose, manual and physical commitment and serious obsession, thereby making these objects unassailable for (cultural) political appropriation and at the same time more resistant as warning signs of the human understanding of power, greed and desire.