About Sculpture

Sculpture is the twofold focus of Kicken Berlin’s spring exhibitions. Sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp represent pathbreaking, abstract tendencies in sculpture of the twentieth century. Unifying both oeuvres is the extreme concentration and reduction of sculptural expressions and the continual study of plastic forms in light and space. Photographs of Brancusi’s sculpture in the atelier and Arp’s harmonious and biomorphic plastic figures create a framework for a visual treatise on body and figure. The interaction of sculpture and photography as a visual transformation of plastic bodies happens primarily through the manipulation of light. Through photography we experience sculpture anew. Brancusi made this standard his own. He showed an early interest in photography’s possibilities, which he idiosyncratically implemented as early as 1905 to congenially illustrate his works. He received instruction in camera technique and darkroom work from no less that Man Ray. The sculptor found that the photographic medium afforded him new, superior perspectives on his own work. The effects of light and space were essential; they exaggerated and transformed the pieces, a “metamorphosis of light” (Christoph Brockhaus), and expressed their complexity. Light and shadow became independent modes of expression. In addition to the individual works, the sculptural assemblages in the atelier were also important, as here the work and the atmosphere of the atelier came together in a magic and surreal world. Hans Arp, literary figure, illustrator, painter, and sculptor, greatly shaped the course of art in the first half of the twentieth century. He was among the founders of Dada Zurich and exhibited with André Breton’s circle of Parisian surrealists. Arp related how his early nature studies influenced his essential and effective design elements over the course of decades: “In Ascona I did (...) drawings of (...) roots, grasses and stones (...). Finally, I simplified these forms and united their essence in fluid ovals, symbols of the metamorphosis and becoming of the bodies” (Hans Arp, Unsern täglichen Traum…, 1955). The “fluid oval” became one of the characteristic shapes of Arp’s fluid-compact sculptures. His late sculptural work is dedicated to both natural things as well as the idea of man, expressed in heads and figures. Essential to both is the idea of transformation or metamorphosis, to which Arp was introduced by Wassily Kandinsky in 1911.