Rudolf Belling. Sculptures and Architectures

About

Rudolf Belling (1886–1972) was one of the most important German sculptors of classical modernism. Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, which held the artist’s first museum exhibition in 1924, now presents this pioneer of sculptural abstraction in the large-scale show Rudolf Belling. Sculptures and Architectures. The exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of his oeuvre in 40 years and shows Belling’s importance for the avant-garde of the 20th century. The exhibition takes ten main works from the 1920s as its point of departure, including the famous Dreiklang (Triad, 1919/24). The total of around 80 exhibited items from the 1910s to the 1970s, including sculptures, drawings, models, films, photographs, and figures, illuminate the many facets of a sculptor who did not limit his work to the medium of sculpture alone.

Belling’s artistic creation over six decades was shaped by a unique variety: his stylistic vocabulary ranges from expressionism to new objectivity, futurism to constructivism, abstraction to naturalism. In view of the genres, he also violated standard lines of division. He worked as a stage designer and costume designer, an architectural and advertising sculptor, a portraitist, and a designer; in collaboration with architects, he created interiors, architectural sculpture, fountains, and monuments; construction utopias found expression in visionary designs; his “fashion sculpture” is considered still today an outstanding example of the modern mannequin.

Belling consciously pursued that kind of genre-defying heterogeneity: “Whether figurative or abstract, I allow everything that seems to be necessary to form according to organic laws,” the artist wrote in 1922. The exhibition illuminates the numerous facets of the sculptor who did not limit his work to the medium of sculpture alone.

The exhibition is made possible by the Freunde der Nationalgalerie.