Modern and Contemporary art — A1165: From Baselitz to Vasarely
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.
Leopold Rabus is a Swiss surrealist painter whose favorite medium is oil painting. He depicts the surrounding reality, inhabiting it with surrealistic birds, snails and yard animals, or ordinary objects. The people in Rabus's paintings, on the other hand, are often insane and horrible, but they live ordinary human lives.
Kiki Smith is a West German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.