Stephan Balkenhol
Through 16 September the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is exhibiting a sculpture by German artist Stephan Balkenhol, Big Head‐Column (2013), on the Grand Canal Terrace of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni—a project of Sandro Rumney’s Art of The Next Century Gallery (Paris) and of the Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach, Germany.
Stephan Balkenhol (Fritzlar, Germania, 1957) is an internationally renowned German artist who for more than two decades has been carving commonplace figures from everyday life. His choice of figurative wood carving was a response to the abstract, minimalist and conceptual approaches of the Hamburg School of Fine Arts where he studied from 1976 to 1982 under Ulrich Rückriem. Echoing classical statuary they nonetheless forego any attempt at ideal beauty. His figures, often diminutive or outsize in scale, are carved from single trunks of wood, placing Balkenhol in a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages. The works are chiseled from the trunk, leaving the marks of his working and the wood grain and knots visible. He then uses paint in both a descriptive and structural way with results that resemble German Expressionist work early in the 20th century but without investing the figure with either expression or character. They become ‘normal’, like strangers encountered in the street, whose personality and lives we as spectators can only imagine.
Balkenhol lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Meisenthal, France. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. (1995), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Saatchi Collection in London (1996), and the Arts Club of Chicago (1998), among many other museums and galleries.