Dietrich Klinge: Du und Ich / You and I
Galerie Scheffel
02 September 2020 - 14 November 2020

Galerie Scheffel
Ferdinandstraße 19
61348 Bad Homburg v.d.Höhe
Germany

Opening hours :
Tuesdays to Fridays, 2pm-7pm
Saturdays, 11am-3pm (not on 3 Oktober 2020)

Featured works

Info

Galerie Scheffel is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by the sculptor and graphic artist Dietrich Klinge, to be held from 2 October until 14 November 2020. The focus of the exhibition, entitled “You and I”, will be a new cycle of sculptures which once more extends the artist’s oeuvre and points to a new direction.

Following the exhibition of a representative selection of his larger than life-sized figures in Galerie Scheffel’s Jakobshallen in 2018, Dietrich Klinge now presents an exhibition of works focussing on the fragment in the gallery’s spaces in the Bad Homburg Ferdinandstrasse. Here, a large number of current works will be placed alongside sculptures in different formats from earlier creative periods, as well as etchings.

Dietrich Klinge is internationally known primarily for his umistakeable sculptural work devoted to the human figure. In the light of his intensive engagement with the long tradition of this thematic within the visual arts, Klinge takes up a unique position of his own, mediating between the classical and the contemporary. With his abstract-figurative forms, he creates a distinctive pictorial world of whole figures, busts, heads and reliefs, whose powerful presence results from their existential expressiveness. Klinge does not depict; rather, and with great artistic originality, he brings to life timeless sensations and conflicting spiritual conditions. His works tell of human entrapment, of subtle and destructive states, of beauty and perishability, being and nonbeing – and yet their meaning always remains open.

Klinge’s sculptural practice is based on his working of wood models, which he then casts in bronze. Normally, he shapes his natural source material with a chainsaw, which gives his intense expressive figures and body fragments in bronze the appearance of roughly hewn wood.

Since 2018 Klinge has broadened his repertoire, creating a new group of works carefully modelled from rotting porous wood. In the completed bronzes this perceived sense of brittleness is preserved. In both form and concept these works impressively explore the potential of fragmentary sculpture. “It is a series about fragments, destruction and nature”, explains Dietrich Klinge – explicitly with an eye on current global challenges: “These works deal with the fragility of all life.”

Dietrich Klinge, born in 1954 in Heiligenstadt, first studied graphic art then sculpture, under Herbert Baumann and Alfred Hrdlicka, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart from 1973-1984. Since the early 1990’s, Klinge has exhibited his graphic and sculptural work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in different countries in Europe, as well as in the USA and South Korea. In Germany, his extraordinary presentation of 21 bronzes in the historical grounds of Eberbach Monastery in the 2013 Blickachsen Biennale attracted special attention. Today, Dietrich Klinge’s work can be seen in the public spaces of many German cities as well as in private collections and public museums around the world – for example, the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in the United States, the Museum Beelden aan Zee in the Netherlands, or the Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany.

The “Dietrich Klinge: You and I” exhibition in the Galerie Scheffel will be open Tuesdays to Fridays from 2-7pm and Saturdays (except 3 Oct.) from 11am-3pm.

We will be happy to provide press photos free of charge.

> Download press release (PDF)