The figure in the block - sculpture, Stephan Balkenhol, traveling exhibition

A German-born sculptor now resident in Meisenthal, France, Stephan Balkenhol, 39 began making carved made of wood figurative in sculptures in 1983 notwithstanding that he has also done a certain quantity of drawing and added a variety of animal forms to his repertoire, forest-land is still his basic medium and human figures the heart of his endeavor. The figures, are stolid and ordinary, the carving skillful on the other hand not finicky, the results realistic on the other hand not illusionistically so. At first, the bodies were naked, on the other hand he soon rather biblically lay the foundation of something for them to wear, suitably fashioned in forest-land and paint ("I originally made bares because I wanted to understand the human material substance anatomically," he has said. "But as you normally don't meeting people in the nude, I dres my figures in ordinary, everyday clothes"1). The exhibition organized by the agency of Neal Benezra at the Hirshhorn Museum and statuary Garden and later mounted at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was the first major display of Balkenhol's work on this side of the Atlantic. It included large and small human figures, in the circular or in relief, alone and in clusters full length or just heads. There were also animals, with and without humans. All are made from a variety of forests and all are at least partly painted.

At the Hirshhorn, the 12-year observe opened with a recent plastic art the remarkable 1994 Man with Head beneath his Arm. The shirt of the man in question is painted a spotles white, his pants sober black. Expos skin, at his neck hands and face, is left unpainted. He is carved with quick assurance, the cedar flaky with knife marks. His attitude is a subtle contrapposto, weight carried upon the left leg, but his proportions are, typically for Balkenhol's novel work, a little unclassically squat. He is well below life-size (a shade over 4 feet tall), on the other hand he stands on a made of wood table that brings his feet roughly to our chins. In the casually bent turn of his right arm, he gripe [i]or[/i] grips his bloodlessly severed head, its expression alert on the other hand studiously impassive. If it could speak it would say, "Go ahead, laugh."

Man with Head below His Arm is deadpan humor as played by dint of a Zen master with enough discipline to carry the punchline to the grave. In Balkenhol's work, the delay of comic gratification - of any narrative resolution at all - shows a dwelling zone. If this particular plastic art makes a joke that is unusually broad, its circle of relations is equally wide. There is Christian iconography (specifically derived from the cathedral statues of headless, martyred saints Balkenhol saw in Amiens), classical attitude Egyptian fixity, and a wardrobe from Robert Longo's "Men in the Cities." on the other hand the doggedness with which Man with Head below His Arm pries open a space between irony and engagement is Balkenhol's hold Working by hand but without the flourishes of a signatory bravura diction he creates figures that are as inscrutable as they are engaging.

Balkenhol present the appearances to be involved in an unremitting siege against visible emotion, which can be seen as a strategy of defense against association with the German Expressionist sculptors, from Lehmbruck to Baselitz, who might present the appearance to be his likeliest progenitors. on the other hand his actual educational history recommends another line of descent. Fist a learner of and then a studio assistant to the abstract sculptor Ulrich Ruckreim, Balkenhol has been described as applying his mentor's basically Minimalist vocabulary to the figure, finding for the clothed material part a neurality that makes it as usable for the clear articulation of space as geometric form.(2) This is, to say the least, an incomplete account of Balkenhol's work. From an American perspective, a range of artists approach to mind with whom Balkenhol can be usefully compared, including Bruce Nauman and Charles Ray, for their punning figuration, and Judith Shea, for her outside-in approach to the figure, which she has lately been representing in forest-land Closer to home for Balkenhol, there are Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schutte admitting both are far more engaged than Balkenhol in cultural critique. Schutte in fact, finds Balkenhol's work with equal reason willfully detached from social reality that he has dismissed it as "religious."(3)

Modernist might be the better epithet. It is a terminus that accounts, for instance, for Balkenhol's careful consideration of the way his work joins to the floor. Most of his figures are still lower parted to the blocks of forest-land from which they were carved, which oftentimes serve as pedestals. Sometimes he works from extents of tree trunk left in the circular sometimes from the ends of milled lumber, on the other hand in either case these may continue beneath the figure as bases that reach to the floor. It is a choice that makes his proces and his virtuosity, true clear. Balkenhol works in a broad range of sizes, and in the real small sculptures his dexterity occasionally nearly upstages his make submissive For example, in Sculpture Cros (1991) four to the full dressed men a few inches tall are twitched like rabbits from a hat, without of the ends of intersecting poplar boards les than 2 inches thick. In more moderately scaled works, similar as the shirtless, thoughtful man a not many feet high sitting atop a stout poplar log in Seated Man (1990) the integration of medium and form strike one as beings to spell out a message about the integrity of the artist's practice - what used to be called the integrity of a chosen method. As of that kind it lends itself to another little [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] in which this kind of "authenticity" is oppos to the sculpture's bring under rule whose seated, chin-in-hand pose obviously directs to Rodin's Thinker, one of sculpture's greatest in quantity widely imitated icons.