Dietrich Wegner at Pulse
by Kelsey Keith
Last week we were taken aback at NYC's Pulse Art Fair by artist Dietrich Wegner's "Playhouse," an installation shaped like a mushroom cloud and built like a tree fort covered in swaths of cotton. A study in contradiction, "Playhouse" mingled with tattooed babies and dotted light paintings in Chicago gallerist Carrie Secrist Gallery's booth.
Wegner creates "images that are safe and unsettling, abject and beautiful… all in an effort to explore our varied states of contentment and security." His sculpture, downsized from its original height of 20 feet, was a welcome respite despite its nuclear connotations. Poly-fill and wool form a tactile shell for the interior space of the playhouse, a dreamy and cocoon-like pod on a spiraling base.
