Dietrich Klinge
Recent Sculptures, Preliminary Drawings
01.04.2008 - 03.05.2008
He forms their faces with a chainsaw blade and seals their expression with a cast of bronze – Dietrich Klinge creates sculptures rife with raw magnitude and frail loveliness.
His natural and casual perfection in dealing with material and shape make him a master of his trade.
As of April 1st 2008 Galerie Terminus on Promenadeplatz will exhibit recent sculptures and – exclusively presented by the gallery – previously unreleased preliminary drawings of the exceptional artist.
The Heads are perhaps the initial point. The fragmentary faces gaze upon the viewer, most of them without a neck, rigid and unyielding, with malformed mouths and introversive glance. They are incapable of movement and solemnly a void substitutes the neck and body. A feeling of vulnerability surrounds them, as well as Dietrich Klinges stelas, busts and figures. Despite of their neck and their head they are imprisoned in their own materiality and shape by the unprocessed wood block and over-proportionated limbs. You will usually find them in a sitting position, missing arms or due to their proportion unable to extract themselves from the environment in order to evolve their individual activity. And yet the impression of an archaic sensuousness and strength remains persisting, which surrounds these sculptures and captivates the viewer – far over the excess of struggle, which these figures seem to fight out. Dietrich Klinges sculptures do not possess the obvious beauty ideals. The misshaped outlines and bewildering proportions of the heads and busts, stelas and large figures level the way for the viewer to ' under the skin' of his work. The chain saw is for Dietrich Klinge as an extension of his arm an important component of his work. It is the uncontrollability of the machine, its objective and irrepressible Strength, which force a distance between himself and his work. But the wood sculpture, that evolves from this struggle against the resistance of the material, remains only the first level of his work. The bronze casting, which unfold itself from this model, is the actual art piece. Only the bronze grants the sculptures their true skin. Frigid, reserved and imperishably the bronze catches the faces and bodies in a rigidity, which underlines their expression of calmness and oneself-introversion. But Klinges work are rarely peaceful in their comprehensive sereneness. For the artist the human face, or the whole human nature are not to be taken granted for, as opposed to something abandoned, which was snatched from the nature. The act of cutting out as symbol of a brutal, destructive reality, faces the calm view of an inviolable itself, an interrelation between distance and familiarity, between retreat and intimacy.
