Visual Arts

In 1817 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe declared to the “Association of German Sculptors” that “The main objective of all sculpture is depiction of human dignity as expressed in the human form”. He thereby summarized what is illustrated by the sculpture of many centuries: the human being as subject of the art of sculpture. Goethe’s teaching exerts an influence down to the present day but as the years have passed it has been influenced by various trends.

The formal language of pre-war sculpture in Germany was shaped by the currents of Surrealism, Cubism, and Expressionism. This richness of artistic trends was violently suppressed during the thirties and forties in Germany by National Socialist Realism. Important German sculptors such as Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) and Ewald Mataré (1887-1965) were persecuted and their work, labelled “Degenerate Art” by the Nazis, was obstructed. Barlach concentrated on depiction of the human figure, while much of Mataré’s creativity focused on representation of animals. The work of these two sculptors has in common a conscious search for what is constant in nature and human existence rather than depiction of hectic everyday life. Representation of human beings remained figurative, faithful to the human image, and sculpture was rounded and weighty. In the final years of his life Mataré also turned to religious themes, creating the bronze cones for the south portal of Cologne cathedral and the doors of the Church of World Peace at Hiroshima.

Structuring of Space

The post-war art of the fifties and sixties brought about great upheavals among traditional sculptors. Work founded on rounded volumes resting in themselves was replaced by light and linear spatial sculpture. Balance, weightlessness, and geometry as the means of architectural construction were the premisses of a new artistic development. Sculpture no longer existed on its own account; now it served to structure space. One of the most important German representatives of this linear sculpture in Germany was Norbert Kricke ( 1922-1984). Kricke had very close contacts with the Zero Group in Düsseldorf and with the Nouveau Réalisme artists in Paris. At the end of the fifties and start of the sixties a sculptural ‘scene’ came into being in Düsseldorf, seeking to re-establish links with international developments in which Germans played an active and innovative part. The Rhineland became an art centre which could stand alongside such metropolises as Paris, New York, or Milan. Norbert Kricke did not construct his sculpture in accordance with some pre-established plan. Instead he took up the movement of the wire, allowing its bends and folds to take him in a different direction. He was concerned with movement and space rather than outline and mass. Such traditional sculptor’s materials as bronze and stone were replaced by the new possibilities offered by metal, glass, cement, light, latex, and fiberglass if sculptural expression demanded that.

Eva Hesse (1936-1970) from Hamburg played a particularly important part during the sixties in development of international art in Germany. With her large sculptures between 1966 and 1970 and use of such new and unusual materials as latex and fiberglass, Eva Hesse succeeded in making a breakthrough in New York’s artistic world. A grant that made possible a studio at Kettwig an der Ruhr also allowed her to establish contact with such internationally known German sculptors as Hans Haacke, Karl-Heinz Hering, and Joseph Beuys.

Felt and Lard

The work of Düsseldorf artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was formed by his Theory of Social Sculpture. This concept, which shaped German art of the seventies and eighties, led to an expansion of the traditional idea of art. The new art was viewed as a holistic process of understanding in which anyone could participate without having to observe strictly applied principles regulating creativity. Beuys’s sculptural work included Objects and Installations made from his characteristic materials of felt and lard, but there were also Actions intended to bring about political change and break open outmoded structures of thought.

Monumental Sculpture was created alongside “Social Sculpture” as being characteristic of the seventies and eighties. These colossal forms seemed to complement and challenge city architecture. They can be represented by the sculpture of Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff (b. 1923) with her organically flowing abstract forms made from chrome-nickel steel. The modern city was also a challenge for sculptor Hans Kock (b. 1920). Enormous architectural volumes demanded that the artist generate the intermediate forms of monumental sculpture as a preliminary stage leading to the vastness of monumental buildings. The aim was to create new sculpture out of the play of free and for the most part abstract forms which could stand alongside architecture.

Playing with Possibilities

The period from the Nineties to the Present is characterized by versatility of formal language, irony, and refinement, drawing on the repertoire of traditional sculpture, spatial work, and installations. Internationally acclaimed artists, represented at the Kassel Documenta, such as Thomas Schütte (b. 1954), Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957), and Bogomir Ecker (b. 1950) represent a new generation of artists in Germany who interpret sculpture absolutely individually and without affectations.

Bogomir Ecker created a fourteen-part sculpture as a work for a public place. This was shaped as an ear and made of sheet-steel painted red. The unobtrusiveness of installation of the red ear on 14 beech trees in Hamburg’s Jenisch Park constituted a poetic staging.

Stephan Balkenhol , who studied sculpture with Ulrich Rückriem (b. 1938), is one of the best-known representatives of figurative sculpture in Germany. When Balkenhol uses oak to sculpt figures over two metres high and then paints them, he creates manifestations of stoical calm. At Lübeck they are enthroned on the roof of the Musikkongresshalle, heads raised and gazing into the distance, deep in thought.

For the German Federal Parliament in Berlin Franka Hörnschemeyer (b. 1958) devised a spatial construction that is to be seen in the northern courtyard of the Paul-Löbe-Haus. The outcome is a complex interweaving of metal fencing like a hedge maze. For the observer this walk-in work opens up numerous perspectives and a linear spectrum of forms.

Klaus Hack (b. 1966), who studied at the Berlin College of Visual Arts under Rolf Szymanski and Lother Fischer, devotes himself to an archaically abstract depiction of the human form. One by one, Hack saws and chisels forms out of a tree trunk and paints the raw wooden figure white. Deploying almost stoical meticulousness, he succeeds in shaping a filigree garment out of a block of wood. The works of Klaus Hack, on show in the Mannheim Kunsthalle and elsewhere, thus demonstrate technical refinement, love of detail, and balanced proportions.

In his idiosyncratic response to nature, Rolf Bergmeier (b. 1957) works on wooden forms that seem to embody lightness rather than massive volume. The “Oil on Wood” net-like objects, creating an organic whole from linked branches painted with oil, develop a dynamism of their own and become autonomous natural creations of a sacral lightness. The relevance of Rolf Bergmeier’s works, shaped by studies at the Hamburg College of Visual Arts, is revealed by their acceptance in the Lafrenz and Reinking collection of recent art at Bremen’s New Weserburg Museum from April 2004.

Action Films as Source of Inspiration

Inspired by everyday design, media, and comics, Thomas Scheibitz (b. 1968) takes motifs out of their familiar context and places them in space as large figures. This sculptural (de)construction of supposedly well-known symbols and signs evokes questions about the origins of form and its multiple significances in landscape and architecture. Thomas Scheibitz studied under Professor Kerbach at the Dresden College of Visual Arts and became internationally known with his presentation of the German Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Capturing the human figure in movement is a great challenge where Viviane Gernaert (b. 1976) achieves considerable success. She takes her motifs from action films, sculpturally transforming high-speed sequences of chase scenes and shoot-outs by freezing them visually and thereby depicting protagonists’ movements. Viviane Gernaert thus brings about a metamorphosis of scenes basically characterised by terror and violence, utilising an aestheticising formal language which endows the human figures, wrapped in layers of snow-white linen on polystyrene, with an element of purism. Cinema determines the duration of a spectator’s receptivity, appropriating time, whereas Viviane Gernaert’s sculpture and installations exist timelessly in space. Movement, time, and space are the criteria determining the work of an artist who in 2006 received a grant from the Friends of the Hamburg College of Visual Arts.

Jörg Plickat (b. 1954) creates sculpture in stone, steel, and bronze. He lives in Hamburg and Bredenbek (Schleswig-Holstein), and studied at the Muthesius School in Kiel. The intellectual aspect of Plickat’s sculpture involves the impact of relationships between volume, material, situation, and light and shade. His simplified geometrical formal language is comprehensible worldwide, unifying both intimacy and monumentality - as in the 25 ton work made from Chinese marble, which was chosen, after a two-year selection process, for presentation in Beijing’s Olympic Park where the 2008 Summer Olympics are being held.

On the art market sculpture is among the favourites for the years ahead. Demand for real quality – whether dating from the post-war period in Germany or representing contemporary art – continues to rise. That indicates the way sculpture is seen both in Germany and internationally.