Art transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Charles worthen turns household silicone caulking into sculptures of strange beauty. Brightly colored and exuberantly shaped, these creaturely works are visual oxymorons: simple overall yet baroque in detail, organic in form but artificial in material, cheerfully disarming yet surreptitiously menacing. The soft swirling spikes squirted out like cake icing invite us to touch or perhaps eat them, but they also look as if they might sting. Humorous and predatory at the same time, these works have an energy that comes from the way they both reveal and conceal their buried significance. "These strange fruity planets", as Joel Fisher calls them in the accompanying essay, oscillate in the transformative space where the real and the imaginary overlap. The artist: Charles Worthen, born 1958 in Boston. Lives and works in Cologne.