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| Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen Installation View |
I dragged my feet a little to this exhibition; the sculptures looked interesting but unvaried in the posters around town. It took time, walking around, but over the course of a couple of hours, I was charmed and increasingly fascinated by Josephsohn's bold and intensely emotional works. Likewise, the sculptures gained in complexity over the course of my two hour visit.
The exhibition was curated by Swiss artist Albert Oehlen who wanted to privilege the materiality of the sculptures. Given the physical immensity of Josephsohn's work, and their enormous presence, it would be difficult to privilege any other aspect!
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| Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen Installation View |
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| Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen Installation View |
At first sight, the forms are a complete mess: they are unmistakeably human, but the proportions of torsos, heads, and facial features are often skewed. The faces are particularly deformed, sometimes only a protruding triangle as a nose, a ridge beneath as a mouth is all we are given. And yet it is enough. We clearly recognize the human likeness. There is also a distinct difference between the male and the female forms. The male figures legs and torso are more defined than the women's. And however stopped the man is, he's often in motion. We do not always notice the details because the overwhelming sense that we get is one of loneliness and loss. Always, the figure is along on its plinth, even if it interacts with other works. Thanks to Oehlen's stunning curation, they form communities, repeated, always with a slight difference.
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| Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005 |
Contemporary artist Oehlen's curation is itself a work of art, emphasizing as it sets out to, Josephsohn's materials and the materiality of the figures. As I say, it would be difficult not to focus on the material because the plaster and brass are so sensuous. In many ways, the sculptures are about the material and the form that results from gouging, pitting, plying. It is as if Josephsohn is asking himself over and over: how can I push the material to create an extreme human form? We may even think of the sculptures as evidence of the artist thinking with his hands. Josephsohn has no interest in narrative, the difficulty of being human and living in history. Rather, he is enamoured with the plaster and brass. The figures are raw, rough, haptic, reminding us of volcanic rock. The deformed bodies that result say as much about how the artist sees beauty as it does his political or historical world view.
Josephsohn, born in what was Königsberg, and is now Kaliningrad to a Jewish family, is said to have filled his sculptures with the tumultuous energy of growing up in Nazi Germany. This chaotic agitation and anxiety is literally present in the physical form resulting from manipulated material. Nevertheless, these works are still about the human hiding inside the material and the method of execution. Josephsohn's hands have a presence in their movement around the sculpture. In the early works, the plinth is as important as human form, and then by the end the figure reaches such levels of abstraction that it becomes the plinth. As a result, Josephsohn's creations become monsters, gentle and warm, but deformed giants, nevertheless.
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| Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005 |