(born in Fritzlar in 1957)
five male nudes, 1999, coihue southern beech tree, the figures partially painted on base, each 162 x 24 x 33.5 cm, figures 40 cm high (5)

Provenance:
Galerie Monica Cardenas, Milan
Private Collection, Asia
Sotheby’s, New York, 10 November 2004, lot 572
Private Collection, Germany
Grisebach, Berlin, 28 November 2014, lot 765
Private Collection, Northern Germany

Stephan Balkenhol is one of the most important contemporary German sculptors. He lives and works in Kassel, Karlsruhe and Meisenthal, France. He has also been a professor of sculpture at the Staatliche Akademie für Bildende Künste Karlsruhe since 1992.
His oeuvre consists of figurative motifs, representations of people and animals in wood. It encompassed both standing, three-dimensional sculptures and two-dimensional relief panels, both single figures and groups. Balkenhol’s sculptures are mostly anonymous figures or animals. In contrast to his current sculptures, his early works often depict nudes.
The work offered here shows five male nudes in his column figure style. As is typical of the artist, these are anonymous figures, average in appearance and mysterious and ageless in their apparent lack of emotion or detailed features. The viewer’s interpretation alone shapes their attitude towards the depicted persons, as the sculptures’ posture appears emphatically relaxed and neutral.
Balkenhol’s sculptures, which he carves directly from wooden trunks and places on minimalist wooden plinths, seem strangely distanced and at the same time very familiar due to their ordinary appearance. This contradiction makes his sculptures as exciting as they are unique.