boundary to the correspondence of the forms with their surrounding
space.
After a hiatus of about 20 years in which I did not work with reliefs, I took
up this work again in a rather geometric form. It is less playful and thus
represents the contrast of the strictness of my later years to the forms I
invented in my middle years. Moreover, I have tried to produce a homo-
geneity between the relief works and the embossed prints which allows
the series to correspond harmoniously to each other. The light conditions
of the surroundings are what give both series their effect. The owner of
such a work is always challenged to find a place to hang it which corre-
sponds to his notion of the best effect of the work. However, the works
never remain the same in daylight. They are as alive as the fall of the light
which awakens them to life.
Series
Space
In 1998 I turned to sculpture for the first time. Here, the time tunnel
dominates the intellectual orientation, and until now I have not taken
any other paths with respect to sculpture, if one disregards the reliefs I
made during the eighties. The possibilities of exploring this theme by
designing different variants of the time tunnel, however, have not yet
even come close to being exhausted. There is still considerable space
here for creating something new.
I feel a very close affinity to sculpture. For decades I have been studying
the work of Eduardo Chillida. Together with my wife Yuko I visited him in
San Sebastian and sought his friendship. As to my affinity to material, I
am attracted equally to bronze and steel. The mere arduousness of the
intellectual (and material) interaction with such masses of steel or
concrete as Chillida was able to achieve keeps causing me to shy
inwardly away from such heroic acts of coping with the material. Apart
from Chillida, the work of Henry Moore has impressed me for several
decades and, incidentally, also Hermann Noack and the wonderful
craftsmen of his fine art foundry in Berlin, who cast most of these
masterpieces of sculpture in bronze.
Due to their three-dimensionality, it is often easier to endow sculptures
and objects with the content of contemporary art in the context of poetic
transformation and concretisation than it is to do so with paintings or
graphic prints. This is especially true when thoughts, customs or myths
have had an influence in creating the form. Thus, I showed my time
tunnel to Frank-Thomas Gaulin and several friends at the Art Multiple
exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1998. The time tunnel consists of a cube made
of wood, metal or stone that has been hollowed out on the inside, giving
it the form of a hollowed cube. The front side of the cube has equidi-
stantly arranged, vertically positioned elongated slots. A piece of paper
that has been rolled, carefully folded and tied with a hemp string is stuck
into one (or more) of these slots. The time tunnel exhibited in Düsseldorf
was made of beech wood and painted red on the four outer sides. Only
the two surfaces that allow a look through the tunnel show the untreated
material wood. With this choice of using colour, a certain tension occurs
between the untreated material at the ends and the smooth coloured
surfaces. Thus the impression is conveyed that the time tunnel is a
segment, i.e. only a part, extracted from a much longer, perhaps infinitely
long tunnel.
4 -
Time Tunnel III,
Bronze,
S 003
3 -
Time Tunnel I,
S 001
2
