They cautiously move between earth and ether

Gerald Moroder’s work is characterized by a vital tension and an innate longing. His figures, lean and reduced to essential shapes, strive towards another place, craving for a way, a revelation. They are images of the human essence, timeless figures without any connections to space and time.

Anna Lisa Ghirardi
2017

How can one not think of wood? A young man in his forties who has grown artistically amidst the splendid mountains of Val Gardena and who is brave enough not to use wood. Gerald Moroder has grown up in this enchanted place. He is the son of a new culture, a contemporary neophyte, who dares, experiments and mutates. The material chosen by the artist, made and shaped with his hands, is a way to express his feelings. His mountains lie within those unique compounds made of stone, earth, sand and iron. The fundamental transition from the „convenience“ of a pre-established natural element awaiting crafting and manufacturing like wood, and the „refinement“ of a unique, authentic, original mix. Although being and appearance have been in contrast ever since, Moroder‘s sculpture asserts itself for its being.

• It is presence and absence.
• It is light and shadow.
• It is material and soul.
• It is movement and stasis.
• It‘s the inner and outer being.

According to Schopenhauer, “It is only the light that a man kindles for himself which a afterwards shines for others”. Moroder embraces this feeling of purification and of the elevation of the self. The human being becomes thin, slender and loses the characteristics of a facial expression. The identity becomes secondary and useless. Moroder‘s research leads to the universal passing through the individual, and is immediately close to the viewer and enters into a direct dialogue with him. In Moroder‘s sculptures there are the primitives, the ancients, the Etruscans; a million layers of images runs in our eyes, influenced or not by different cultures. In his sculptures there are the great contemporaries who have forever marked the development of art history by defining turning points in figuration. An artist cannot become an orphan and deprive himself of all this past.
Moroder is a child of his time and in his time, he is able to produce new images and is still extraordinarily distant from an ancient „before“ or from a near past. The comparison with Giacometti is superb, for the common eye maybe even immediate. However, the completed work remains equally distant. The stylistic signature of Moroder‘s sculpture is scratchy, vibrant, elastic and develops into one, two, three dimensions. Let us leave behind the great Giacometti – and everything he has been able to give - and let us look beyond. The beings shaped by Moroder are suspended in an indefinite time and space, embracing a temporary eternity human beings are yearning for. They are children of Mother Earth, made of Soul and Body. They are errants, wandering for the Essence of Things, highly coveted by those who are rich in spirit. The choice (bold, in my opinion) of using a classical figuration in times in which the human figure has both disappeared and reappeared several times is – though keeping the human being in the centre of every reflection and even transposed in abstract terms – brave and winning. Today’s man and woman are reflected in Moroder‘s sculptures: beauty, ugliness, instability and balance.
To be or not to be. Pride and will. His work is not only contemporary, it is not only aesthetically satisfying and it is not art for its own sake. Moroder brilliantly succeeds in communicating with each of us, in becoming familiar with our inner being and in accompanying us elsewhere, leading us to something more beautiful and something higher. Raise the spirit, not only the eye.

Laura Orlandi
2019

Man. His spiritual essence.

One question pervades Gerald’s works: What lies beneath the material dimension?
It seems as if he wants to pass the boundaries of rationality, those of the hic et nunc in order to be drifted by irrationality.
Being re-conducted to the arché, the basic principle, is a kind of hidden necessity. It’s a departure from the immanence, the everyday life, to enter into himself, to discover and experience mental conditions. And while he creates, the desire to return arises. The approach to an idea which slowly changes and which is transposed in the eyes and hands of the artist. An idea, which inevitably transforms itself into something else, while it takes on an outer form. The shapes of the body transposed in sculpture are the touchable translation of an interior journey.
Gerald distances himself from everyday reality. He nourishes the desire to look into himself and to give life to emotional fragments which inhabit our inner being.

Marco Forni
2016

Moroder shapes the uniqueness of his unmistakable creations with personal and refined mixtures, in a continuous wonderful and appealing crescendo of artistic grace, of poetic combination between perfect anatomy and romantic postures, modelled in the highest classicism of the contemporary art‘s world.
It is a real pleasure for the gallerist to live surrounded by such sublime beauty and spread it as a seed of rare culture.

Alberto Lavit
2019