Stephan Balkenhol
"Stephan Balkenhol" by Ann Danilevich, Fall 2007, pp. 134-35
For someone who claims to avoid narrative, the German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol cunningly invites multiple narrative interpretations of his work. In this exhibition, a man, perhaps an artist or art dealer, stands in front of a bright abstract relief; casually dressed dancing couples fill a room as a woman in a ballgown stands alone on the sidelines; a man reclines under a toadstool twice his size; lions fornicate. Balkenhol’s figures are representations of ordinary people characterized by blank expressions and identical facial features. In the wall text, Balkenhol declares, “Everything that makes up sculpture happens in and through that sculpture and not in some other context.” Yet, he continues, “every sculpture or work of art should also be the occasion for an intellectual debate.”
Balkenhol works primarily in wood, out of which his figures and architectural structures emerge in free-standing low- and high-relief forms. Even after they are painted, their surfaces remain rough and unfinished. The texture of the wood can be reminiscent of Cézanne’s brushwork, although Balkenhol was undoubtedly also influenced by early German woodcarving traditions. His knowledge of art history as well as its contemporary critiques comes through in many pieces. In Relief Frau mit Kleinem Mann (Voyeur), a Lilliputian man gazes, hands behind his back, at a low-relief image of a woman’s face that is hung on the wall in front of him. She looks away, past him and the viewer surveying the scenario. The British critic John Berger comes to mind, with his notion that “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Balkenhol also distinguishes himself through humour and fantasy, as in the work Elefantenman; after ascending a grand staircase, the viewer confronts a man with the head of an elephant.
Initially conceived for Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and expanded for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, this exhibition presents a significant assembly of Balkenhol’s work that includes drawings in addition to the artist’s woodcuts and sculptures. The exhibition is laid out so that large pieces like Ikarus (one of the few bronzes in the exhibition) and Großes Frauengortait (a gargantuan bust of a woman) are juxtaposed with small relief portraits hung on a nearby wall or pint-sized figures who seem to be in the process of assessing their oversized neighbours. The contrasts in scale and ambiguous relationships among the sculptures make it impossible for the viewer to resist reading connective narratives into the work.
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