Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

Man with Fly Agaric

His sculptures are immediately identifiable. If you find yourself in a museum or open space and come across a human figure roughly hewn out of a block of wood with individual parts of its body picked out in colour, you can be fairly certain you are standing in front of a sculpture by the artist Stephan Balkenhol (born 1957). More than just about any other artist of the younger generation, he has managed to make his style as recognisable as a trademark.

Since he began working more than twenty years ago, he has achieved truly sensational success for a contemporary sculptor – internationally as well as in Germany. His productivity appears to know no limits. He creates almost 100 figures a year, using wood as his material of choice.

His art is probably so popular because it appears to be almost naively convinced of the meaningfulness of its own subject. "For thousands of years, the restriction to the human figure and the head never limited the possibilities of art. In Egyptian art, in Roman or gothic sculpture and later, the human head always becomes something completely different. It would be amazing if the head no longer had anything to say to us today." * (Balkenhol, 1999)

Slideshow: The Figurative World of the Sculptor Stephan Balkenhol

Return to the figurative tradition

Man with Bishop's Hat

Despite this, courage was needed to be a sculptor working with the human figure in the early 1980s. The theme appeared to have been exhausted by history. A flood of monuments at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, not to mention the officially decreed pseudoclassicism and unrestrained pathos of the monumental style favoured during the Nazi period, had robbed the depiction of the human in art of all credibility. Furthermore, in view of the true conditions prevailing in the "people's democracies", the figurative arsenal of socialist realism appeared to be one steeped in profound cynicism and insincerity.

The time for heroes of stone and bronze was long gone. The human figure was reserved for garden gnomes and shop window mannequins. Art was ruled by abstraction. Minimalism, conceptual art and material or formal experiments dominated the scene. Sculptures became installations. Sculpture as such seemed dead.

Stephan Balkenhol studied under Ulrich Rückriem. It is hardly possible to think of a greater contrast than that with the work of his teacher. Rückriem is a non-figurative, abstract sculptor who works in stone. It felt as if Stephan Balkenhol was breaking a taboo when he proposed – in all seriousness – a return to the tradition of the human figure. To the present, his work appears practically untouched by the various influences that have come from modernism.

And yet, in his unmistakeable fashion, he succeeds in anchoring his figurative world in the present. The rough traces left in the material never allow the viewer to forget that his pieces are artistic products. And the scale of these works is either larger or smaller than life size.

Almost individual and yet timeless

Figure on Pedestal    and Abstract Relief

His figures wear everyday clothing and have contemporary haircuts. They resemble their viewers to the point of interchangeability, only that they stand strangely frozen on pedestals. They appear almost like individual portraits and yet have something general and timeless about them, without it being possible to define them as examples of a particular type. Their gestures could hardly be simpler. They stand around unmelodramatically in public places or museum galleries. Sometimes it feels if the sculptures are actually looking at the people who have come to see them.

Balkenhol has anchored his sculptures firmly in the history of art and human culture. His peculiar hybrid beings – part-human and part-animal – would be unimaginable without the Egyptians. Nevertheless, he cultivates an almost casual, amused approach to tradition. When he puts a lion's head on a man in everyday clothes or an elephant's trunk on someone who has pushed their hands deep into their trouser pockets, the viewer probably thinks more of carnival costumes or fairytales than exotic gods.

This artist plays with art history. His Tall Classical Man (1996) imitates the gesture of a sculpture by Michelangelo as if he wanted to check whether people can still move like that nowadays. Nor can one see his man pensively sitting on a wooden block without being reminded of Rodin's Thinker. The references to the history of religious sculpture are also obvious: a very ordinary-looking person stuck through with arrows or a young woman in a short blue dress who holds a naked grown man in her arms. We notice the nod to the tradition and laugh at the shameless dislocation of its visual language. Amazingly, though, his figures never become caricatures.

Small Man with Giraffe

Hardly any other sculptor has dared to include animals in their work in the same way as Stephan Balkenhol. Apart from a very few exceptions, animals have seemed to be beyond the conceptual reach of modern art. Balkenhol taps into the childish world of toy animals and plays with it in a variety of different ways. Dozens of penguins rise up suddenly and encircle the viewer. A giant giraffe stands in front of Hamburg Zoo, and because it is by this sculptor, we are prepared to accept the fact that a man is trying to climb up its neck as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"The artist has the power to make things that do not exist become real," Stephan Balkenhol once said. Absurd and yet light-hearted, his art celebrates a quite unselfconscious joy in life.