This Autumn, Gallery FUMI presents Companions, an exhibition by Lukas Wegwerth and Corinna Dehn. The show brings together new works that mark a significant and considered evolution in their ongoing Armadillo series.
At the heart of the exhibition is a simple, formal idea: the shingle. In architecture — most notably in the Vogelsberg region of central Germany, where Wegwerth and Dehn maintain a second studio — the shingle has functioned for centuries as both protective cladding and building unit. For Wegwerth and Dehn, the shingle is more than a material or a reference. It is a universal concept, a structural logic that recurs both in nature and man-made designs. Fish scales, butterfly wings, the plated shell of the armadillo exemplify how living things have independently turned to that shape to create structures that combine protection, flexibility, and form.
For this exhibition, that logic is extended in new directions. The six works that debut here — two cabinets, a sideboard, a birdhouse, a dining table, and a stand-alone screen — push the series toward greater chromatic contrast and pattern. New experimentations in the tone, density, and temperature of colour define this series. The use of natural pigments deepens the atmospheric range of the work, such as traditional oil paints from the Vogelsberg region, and an ebonising process in which tannins in the wood react with iron to produce shades of brown and black.
The wood itself carries history. The shingles are sourced from the forests and old buildings surrounding the studio: beams from barns, timbers from houses that are several hundred years old as well as materials from past functional objects are woven into these works. For both makers, this provenance is not incidental. To work with a material whose origin is known is, as Wegwerth and Dehn describe it, an important and liberating thing. The shingle becomes a record of climate, place, and time.
Companions is also a portrait of a collaboration. The overall form and dimensions of each piece are planned together. From there, the individual shingles are shaped, sanded, and pigmented by Dehn while Wegwerth builds the substructure, developing the interior woodwork with the work’s functional intention as a foremost concern. Together, they apply the shingles and through this stage push each other in directions neither would arrive at alone. They are, consistently, surprised by what the finished work becomes.
Each piece is built from the ground up, shingle by shingle, encasing the formal shape of the interior woodwork. The overall form emerges through a process that is as much discovery as it is design. Where the angles are sharpest, the shingles grow smaller, denser and more intricate, the same logic found on the scaling of fish. The resulting surfaces are both protective and alive, the objects become characters or companions.
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