‘Janine von Thüngen’s challenge is ambitious and daring, of the kind that allows an artist to open a breach in the Dantesque dark wood of the contemporary production of meaning’ – Bruno Corà

An elegant sequence of six textural, billowing leaves of bronze, Eternity I Small (2017) is an exquisite sculptural work by Janine von Thüngen. It relates directly to Eternity I, the artist’s monumental outdoor work that was installed at Villa Foscari, Mira, during the 2017 Venice Biennale. There, vast versions of the same six elements—each spanning several metres across, yet a mere eight millimetres thick—adorned the lawn in front of the villa. Spiralling apart from one another at distances governed by the Fibonacci sequence, these expansive sails of majestic, patinated metal evoked the continuity of matter through time and space that is a central theme in von Thüngen’s practice. This notion was underlined by the extraordinary origin of the sculptures’ varied, textured forms: they were created by taking complex silicone casts of the walls of ancient Roman catacombs, which were then cast in bronze. As the exhibition’s curator Bruno Corà explains, ‘The total coincidence of the positive and negative in a two-sided cast form just a few millimetres thick has made it possible to comprise both space and time in a single diaphragm, derived from a hypogeic cavity thousands of years old’ (B. Corà, ‘Eternity: Zero Space-Time in Sculpture’, in Janine von Thüngen: Eternity, exh. cat. Villa Foscari, Mira, Venice 2017, p. 17). In Eternity I Small, von Thüngen replicates the casts on a delicate scale, enriching their tactile planes with an earthy red and yellow patina. The fine edges of each cast, meanwhile—as well as their bases—are polished to a golden lustre, creating dynamic seams of contrast. Like scraps of paper thrown to the wind, these material presences seem miraculously weightless as they dance through space, collapsing the past, present and future in their surfaces.