Contemporary Sculptures — A491: Modern, Post War & Contemporary
Stephan Balkenhol is a German artist known for his sculptures capturing the human form. Based in France and Germany, he specializes in wood sculptures, reliefs, drawings, and graphic techniques like lithography, woodcuts, and stencils. His distinct style features roughly carved and vibrantly painted wooden sculptures, often depicting people, animals, and architecture.
Balkenhol's subjects lack emotions, often gazing into emptiness, resulting in a distant and enigmatic aura. Wood is his primary medium, with softer woods allowing precise facial details while maintaining imperfections like chips, knots, and tool marks. The artist adds paint as a finishing touch, accentuating anatomy and vitality. The textured surfaces beneath the paint layer amplify the sense of life in Balkenhol's works.
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
She studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and became known for her iconic and unusual sculptures and installations.
Fritsch's work often evokes disturbing religious or quasi-spiritual associations and is deeply psychological, as if she were trying to give an image to our deepest fears, extracted from the world of myth, religion, cultural history and everyday life. One of her most impressive works, Rat King (1993), is a circle of sixteen giant rats, each nearly ten feet tall, with their tails tied in a massive knot in the center.
Nicola Samori is an Italian painter-painter and sculptor known for his brutal manipulation of works of art.
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and lives and works in Bagnacavallo.
Samori's work is inspired by the works of great masters, more often in the Baroque style of the 16th and 17th centuries: he creates copies of them and then rips, scratches, pierces them, thereby transforming them, filling them with the restless spirit of our time. In roughly the same way, the artist also creates sculptural works, giving birth to new, modern images rooted in the history of art.
Paloma Varga Weisz is a German sculptor and painter, the daughter of the Hungarian artist Ferenc Farga, who lives and works in Düsseldorf.
She is primarily known for her wood-carved sculptures and installations. In 2012, six of Weisz's drawings were purchased and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Diango Hernández is a Cuban artist who lives and works between Düsseldorf, Germany and Havana. From 1994 to 2003, Hernández was involved with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, which he co-founded with Ernesto Oroza, Juan Bernal, Francis Acea and Manuel Piña. He is married to artist Anne Pöhlmann.
Diango Hernández is a Cuban artist who lives and works between Düsseldorf, Germany and Havana. From 1994 to 2003, Hernández was involved with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, which he co-founded with Ernesto Oroza, Juan Bernal, Francis Acea and Manuel Piña. He is married to artist Anne Pöhlmann.
Andreas Schmitten is a German painter and sculptor living and working between Düsseldorf and Neuss, Germany.
The artist situates his interdisciplinary and diverse work between drawing, sculpture and installation, using attention-grabbing techniques from religion, theater and commodities. He is interested in issues related to the human being and its history. Andreas Schmitten is known for his extensive and highly complex installations in which figures, objects and interiors are used to create fantastic, surreal visual worlds. Lacquered surfaces, pale colors, and mannered, elegant forms characterize his perfectly executed works, which often transform rooms into unreal and fairytale-like settings.
Schmitten's work can currently be seen in the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal and the Villa Ludwig in Aachen. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist.
His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his profession as an architect and relocated to Mexico City.
He has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art that explores urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a broad range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence.
