Kleines Epitaph V

KOENIGmuseum

Description

At the end of the 1970s Fritz Koenig (1924-2017) presented a series of epitaphs to the public for the first time as a group of works: in the context of the Fritz Koenig/Sculptures 1966- 1979 exhibition curated by himself at the Minorite Church in Regensburg, he placed them in dialogue with gravestones and epitaphs from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque. The epitaphs take up a dominant space in Koenig's work until 1988. The medieval epitaph image, in whose spiritual line of tradition Fritz Koenig's group of works of epitaphs stands, is not necessarily related to a person's burial place, unlike a tomb. Nor are Fritz Koenig's epitaphs. Like their pre-modern counterparts, they serve as remembrance. Yet their formal vocabulary is as scarce as possible and unindividualised. The reduction of the human body to stereometric basic forms such as spheres and round rods thus leads to an abstraction process that enables an impressive visual statement due to its cathartic general validity. This is also the case in the Small Epitaph V work: Koenig assembles a curved human body and embeds it on a high, long cuboid in an additive-constructive process. The figure partially protrudes beyond the lying surface and is therefore even more emotionally charged.

Author

Stephanie Gilles M.A.

Rights Statement Description

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0