Lorenz Pasch (b. 1990 in Krefeld, lives and works in Berlin) develops an artistic practice situated between conceptual inquiry, sculptural intervention, and performative gesture. Educated at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee (Diploma in Painting, 2020) and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (M.F.A. in Sculpture, 2023), he has received several accolades, including the Mart Stam Prize (2020) and a Distinction at the Sonotopia Award (2019). His works operate at the intersection of material, movement, and perception—often in dialogue with space, time, and the presence of technical apparatuses.
Many of Pasch’s works are interwoven by dense, often invisible threads—a meshwork in the sense of Tim Ingold: not a network of discrete points, but a tangle of paths, relations, and ongoing processes. This texture runs through his practice on multiple levels—formally, in the marks and gestures that make up each work, and conceptually, in the interplay between body, machine, space, and meaning. In this sense, the line recurs not only as a physical trace but as an abstract connector—linking works to one another, mapping decisions and hesitations, and articulating the movement between concrete material action and conceptual drift.
Take, for instance, “Schritt für Schritt” (2023), in which Pasch uses a welding machine to create a vertical sculpture composed of individually placed, blindly executed dots of molten metal. The resulting form is both record and residue—a tectonic drawing in space, shaped not by control but by a bodily trust in rhythm, gravity, and the resistance of material. The work inscribes action and doubt alike: a durational line formed as much by surrender as by intent.
In Pasch’s practice, the apparatus is never simply instrumental. It is a performative partner, an interface to the world, a resonant body of perception. Machines hide, fail, breathe, illuminate, draw, or cut. Their recurrence is not symbolic but genealogical—each machine recalls another, and each work resonates with others across time. His process is open, contingent, and co-authored—not only with machines but with friction, circumstance, resistance, and chance. These configurations are never fixed, but temporary alliances between fields of force—between control and release, assertion and permeability.
This entanglement is visible in the work where a beam of light breaks sharply at the edge of a wall. The effect—a wedge of light drawn into the room—points to a hidden machine, out of sight but not out of presence. In “nah”, this idea becomes more corporeal: a small hole in the back wall of a street-facing window display releases warm air, fogging the inside of the glass as if someone had just exhaled. The trace, the intervention, the atmosphere—everything is present, though the source remains unseen.
A variation of this gesture appears in “High end low”, where a skeletal metal structure—resembling a standing figure—holds a speaker emitting a slow, rhythmic breath. A pane in front of it fogs up in synchrony, as if the machine had become sentient, aware of its own breathing. In the interaction of object, sound, and atmosphere, a moment of intimacy emerges—perhaps even a technical self-portrait: reduced, mechanical, but touched by affect.
In “research-project” (2016-2020), the line enters urban space directly, in the form of a mysterious, continuous cut stretching over two kilometers of Berlin sidewalk. Its likely source: an angle grinder—an object that recurs elsewhere in Pasch’s work, as tool, trace, or acoustic presence. The cut, the machine, the line, the residue—all refer to one another, forming an inner structure of resonance and mirroring. The line is not just movement through space but a thinking structure, making visible the transition from tool to trace, from technology to atmosphere, from the concrete to the abstract.
Pasch’s work maintains a critical relationship to the conceptual and process-based art of the 1960s. Yet where that era often sought dematerialization or the autonomy of the idea, Pasch is interested in the material entanglements of action, device, and perception. The machines and systems in his works are not minimalist reductions but complex actors within open, evolving processes. He extends the strategies of that generation by grounding them—refusing abstraction in favor of precision, and locating meaning in the mesh of conditions through which the work takes shape.
These self-referential entanglements—between works, materials, gestures—do not resolve but evolve. Again and again, the question returns: where does authorship begin and where does it end? Who produces whom—the artist the machine, the machine the work, the material the thought?
Within this dense, non-linear web of relations lies a quiet reflection on the self. The traces, the interventions, the fogging, the cutting—they are not expressions of identity, but its imprint. Not a classical self-portrait, but a situational self-image rendered through apparatus, material, and space.
Pasch’s work forms a field of forces, where subject, machine, space, and time resist clear separation—a processual way of thinking through things, a sensory writing into space, a poetics of relation.