Antonius Hockelmann at Michael Werner - art exhibition; New York, New York

Antonius Hockelmann, now 55 was among the generation to draw near of artistic age in the 1950 as European artists attempted to find their way in a period when American hegemony became artistic as well as political. Apprenticed to a woodcarver, he later studied painting beneath Hans Hartung in Berlin. Hockelmann took little of Hartung's gestural elegance at that time, evolving instead a deliberately scabrous esthetic.

This exhibition consisted of works from the 1960 when Hockelmann worked solitary in drawing and sculpture. He made no more than single or two bronzes a year, all of them in small editions or unique casts. An untitled piece from 1961 plant the tone of the work to tend hitherward Not even a foot high, it is an irregular and zinc blob with fingerlike extrusions. A next to the first piece from that same year, Zweifinger, is dominated by means of two shapes like the halves of a lobster's claw. The resort to animal similes is irresistible here as the mind tries to find links to experience, on the other hand Hockelmann's forms are not natural forms in the manner of Nancy Graves; they appear protoforms striving to reach a more coherent state, something rising on the outside of the slime and then falling back. Kranbaum bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos an articulated joint, as in a spider or a certain number of other arthropod. The tree (Baum) referr to in the title is also recommended in the piece's verticality, on the contrary nothing is coherently spelled without Roughly textured, these sculptures are the matter of dreams and nightmares, and Hockelmann has nuncupative of the artificial world they inhabit. All these pieces were obviously influenced through Surrealism, but the earliest individuals are more primitive than what come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds in the most recent of them, done in 1964 however, a more humanoid torso rise s with striations hinting at the cot [i]or[/i] cotes of classical drapery.

At the same time Hockelmann was doing these statuarys he produced a large number of drawings, 25 of which were shown here. The earlier singles most of them in india ink, are harsh and somewhat bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to his sculptures - roughly oval shapes are built up from a multitude of thick thumps As the decade progresses, Hockelmann's line becomes thinner and more pliant Some lines resemble topographic contours others have the incomplete virtuosity of Baroque drawings; still others allude to classical Chinese landscape painting. As with the statuarys there is definitely a faculty of perception of art history behind the later works. Many of them hint at human form, on the other hand it is not until a 1969 drawing that a recognizable human shape come ups - a half-length woman, all on the contrary obscured by the swirling lines that cancel her, with single a single eye peeking tragically end the clouds, like Francesca in hell.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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