L'homme qui marche - Verkörperungen des Sperrigen

The Kunsthalle Bielefeld’s exhibition of L’homme qui marche – Verkörperung des Sperrigen  in the winter of 2019-20 is dedicated to sculpture. Starting with major pieces from our own sculpture collection and supplemented by first-rate works on loan, the show, which runs from November 9, 2019, to March 8, 2020, deals with sculpture’s embodiment of volume from the classic modern era to the present time, from Rodin to today. From the late nineteenth century onward, when Auguste Rodin finally invalidated the type of beauty idealized in the canon of ancient classical sculpture, the forms of sculpture that have continued to emerge always deal with the discrepancy between the traditionally “beautiful” and the increasingly “awkward or difficult,” in the sense of the abstract, the incomparable, and the visually contradictory.

In 1877-8 Auguste Rodin created what is now considered a trailblazing sculpture, L`homme qui marche (The Walking Man). It is considered a turning point in the history of sculpture, because Rodin declared a new paradigm through it, in which an incomplete, unfinished, or “imperfect” piece could be regarded as a full-fledged work of art. Moreover, he assembled this work from fragments of previously made sculptures. Essential sections of the walking figure’s legs can be traced back to Rodin’s Saint John the Baptist (1880), while the torso comes from studies for the Porte de l ́enfer (Gates of Hell). All of this helped in overcoming the ideas of nineteenth-century sculpture and its obsession with ancient classical concepts. In its place arose a new kind of artistic freedom that would go on to influence the entire twentieth century. Subsequently, what Wilhelm Lehmbruck called the “eternal humanity of sculpture” found new forms and expressions.