Artists

Hans Josephsohn

Press release

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present a duo exhibition of André Butzer and Hans Josephsohn at Bleibtreustraße 15/16, in Berlin.

Flight, desolation and displacement are deeply inscribed in the work of Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012). Not in terms of motifs or themes, but as a fundamental life experience. Unlike the smooth, gracefully fluid agility of Lehmbruck or Maillol, who inspired him in his youth, and unlike Giacometti's fraying dissolution of the figure in the glistening backlight of an atomic flash, for instance, Josephsohn clings firmly to the figure. Every grasp of the shapeless plaster solidifies the human form. Whether in the case of a tiny figurine or a monumental body, he always strives to achieve the appropriate composure, as if trying to reassure himself again and again of the enduring presence of his sitters. A presence that is brought abruptly and inevitably into the space. Josephsohn works towards a space, into a space. He takes nothing away, but rather brings something new into the world. Positive placements, solid and massive, fragile and delicate. With their jagged and agitated surfaces, with their restrained but decisive colouring, his sculptures become a defiant counterpart to their beholders. The torsos, busts and steles of standing or reclining women are firmly contained in themselves, rounded, clenched. In its archaic simplicity, the individual body asserts itself in its own place. Josephsohn rediscovers this pictorial trait from antiquity, the freestanding individual among the entirety of the cosmos – vulnerable, beset and tackled from all sides, but free despite everything – and therefore open to the possibility of an encounter, of human recognition.