bavarikon4UDescription
Encounters between couples play a major role in the work of Fritz Koenig (1924-2017) and are intrinsic to all creative periods. Early sculptures from the late 1940s and 1950s already show a continuously progressing limiting of form. In works such as "Small Two XII" from 1975, the concentration on the relevant key statement has achieved unmistakable independence and led to a radical reduction in the creative instruments to basic stereometric shapes, such as spheres, cuboids and cylinders. As a sculptor of the 20th century, Koenig saw himself on a similar line of tradition and development to that of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), whom he held in high esteem. He strived to find forms that could exist autonomously in their aesthetics with maximum stringency of sculptural form and also make the human figure intuitively tangible in the conflict of its emotions. He dealt intensively with questions about innovative ways of representing bodies and their dynamic movement processes, which have a conceptual proximity to sculptures by Renaissance artists such as Giambologna. The same goes for "Small Two XII": Koenig plays with the physical laws of gravity and explores them to their limits. The figures, reduced to cylindrical bodies and spherical heads, seem to have lost their stability according to all the laws of statics and suggest the unalterable fall of a couple.
Author
Stephanie Gilles M.A.