Beuys - Sculptures

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JOSEPH BEUYS

SCULPTURES

6 DECEMBER 2014 – 25 APRIL 2015

OPENING: 5 DECEMBER 2014, 6 – 8 PM

In the exhibition »Sculptures«, Galerie Bastian shows works by the late Joseph Beuys. Following a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s drawings at our gallery from October 2013 to February 2014, and afterwards at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, and at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Germany, the current exhibition is a reflection on Beuys’s sculptures and objects.

The development of the sculptural œuvre of Joesph Beuys can be exemplarily traced in the exhibition. Departing from his early works influenced by the German artists Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Ewald Mataré, Beuys developed an uncomparable as well as radical formal and material vocabulary that was unique in its autonomy in post-war modernism and signified a new under-standing of art. The interdependency between performance and sculpture is one of the characteristics of these works, becoming apparent in our exhibition. The work reveals that the œuvre of Joseph Beuys was the formidable attempt to find a new artistic language of civilisation criticism.

The exhibited works by Joseph Beuys from the collection of Céline and Heiner Bastian were on view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art, in Berlin as long-term loans for almost 20 years. They are now installed at Galerie Bastian for the first time, complemented by additional works from a private collection. The gallery space is thus performing a function already designated in Heiner Bastian’s idea and Sir David Chipperfield’s design of the building. It is a great joy to make a significant group of works by Joseph Beuys accessible to the public in this space facing the Museum Island.

The exhibited works are not for sale.