exhibition catalog
6.25 x 5.5" (folds out to 6.25 x 22.5")
two sided, cover stock
biography and essay by Lina Kaiser
full color images
Tim Thyzel has always been part sculptor, part performer and part conceptual artist.

His work often makes interventions in public space, offering observations and critiques of social systems and society that are at once witty and sharp, playful and serious. Tim's work combines all of these qualities to create objects and situations which are both very simple and highly abstract. Although Tim's objects may appear to be useful inventions (a garbagecan backpack, a park on wheels, a shoppingbag tent), I would call them sculpture. They often start with found things, but always evolve into something completely independent and follow a certain concept of poor beauty. Tim's street performances with his objects serve as a sort of proposal of what to do with them, to demonstrate their inherent possibilities, to give additional meaning, or just to bring them to life. The objects themselves live an enduring second life as pure sculpture.

Thyzel has a unique understanding of our common struggle with urban life and the things we use to get along with it. Materials such as boxes, bottles, plastic grocery bags, carts and wheels are all taken for granted, only there to support the things they contain. With a sense for the paradox, he turns these things into their opposite. He may do this by giving them weight with concrete, sewing cheap plastic tote bags together to make a tent or, more recently, building a large-scale birdhouse as a paraphrase of public housing.
In the age of mobility and virtuality, Tim recognizes and appreciates people's need to be able to transport their belongings, cumbersome and heavy as they may be, in simple and cheap ways, ways that are often equal parts creativity and desperation. Tim turns his notions on this subject into something that is deeply absurd and funny. His Wheelies are a series of concrete cast cardboard boxes, each with a set of wheels. These objects are completely unmovable, sort of disabled, and in their heavy presence, something like the most useless thing one could possibly own in NYC.
On the other hand, in his Moveable Park, Tim presents on wheels something that is truly rare and precious: a small bit of green grass, something that everyone is dreaming of in the hot summers of New York. The park is made of a 4x6' plot of grass planted in a functional hand truck, which toured Manhattan in the summer of 1999 so that it could be shared with people in a variety of the city's grass-less parks and recreational areas. In bringing together elements of opposite implications such as the transportable plot of grass, Tim has created yet another impossible object which cannot be anything other than art, but at the same time provides access to the general public in its simplicity and its appeal to the human condition. Tim's work is remarkable for the reaction it elicits from a range of people from children to the homeless, bringing curiosity, interest and even joy to those who were not necessarily looking for an artistic experience.

The way Tim Thyzel creates his work always speaks to the artist's fight against failure, and to the absurdity of one person's acting in a nonprofitable, nonconsumable arena in a society devoted to money, success and progress. Thyzel combines the European intent of the artist as a definition and reflection of their relationship to society with the impressions he gets from his everyday life in New York. He uses forms and ideas and turns them against their usual state and reason, creating a statement on the classical concept of sculpture and representation, beauty and perfection. The physical presence of a conceptual idea is an important part of Tim's work. The process of realizing something that is quite impossible is central, like Sisyphus moving his rock up the hill again and again, demonstrating the impossibility of changing something and the need to keep on trying.

- Lina Kaiser, New York, 2000