World View

The third piece in the cycle „THE MISSING PIECE“, called ‘World View’, pursues these themes as well as the differences between open and closed forms and between limits and the absence of limits.  An upright rectangular frame, 4.9 by 4.9 meters in size and once again with a rust-coated surface, contains fewer of the longed-for highly polished ‘Missing Pieces’.  One of them floats lost in the empty space whereas the others, lower down, are joined together.  Because the frame is free-standing, the spectator can see the foreground and the background at the same time.  Here too the empty space draws attention to the missing elements.  The deliberate gaps are as essential to the whole cycle as they are to Wolf’s thinking: ‘The confrontation between foreground and background only exists so long as something is absent.  When the picture is completed, the background can no longer be seen – the back can only be seen when one of the parts is missing.’  In this work he is also reflecting on the passing of time.  ‘We cannot yet know if the world view will be complete or unbounded in the end.’  Such considerations of completeness or incompleteness can be applied to many systems, and they are at the heart of Wolf’s purpose for the whole work.

For him, the ‘Missing Pieces’ are an enormous source of energy.  ‘The very concept of a gap, of absence in general, also points conversely to a striving for completeness and perfection.  Science, art and love can offer a thousand examples of this.’