Balkenhol, Stephan

Stephan Balkenhol was born in 1957 in Fritzlar, Hesse, Germany and studied art at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts known for its Minimalist and Conceptualist profile.  His first figures appeared in 1983 as a reaction to these artistic practices that celebrated either abstract formalism or sheer ideas, and also in response to the artist’s interest in reintroducing the image of the human body in contemporary art.  These early sculptures consisted of single male or female nudes attached to pedestals, echoing the tradition of classical Egyptian, Roman, and Greek statues. From the mid-1980s to the present, Balkenhol continued to depict the human figure, but now as ordinary looking men or women in simple clothing.  In addition, during the early 1990s, he began to make animal figures alone or in combination with humans, as well as their hybrids. It is through these works, all carved out of wood, that Balkenhol established himself as an internationally renowned artist.

Balkenhol’s artwork includes common-place people who are not meant to be narrative in any explicit way, but are rather suggestive of a certain story, which, with its recognizable characters or situations, seems at once familiar and strange. To put it in Balkenhol’s own words: “I’m perhaps proposing a story and not telling the end, just giving a beginning or fragment. There is still a lot for the spectator to complete…”  Balkenhol aims for objectivity and neutrality of representation. It is here that we can recognize the traits of Pop and Photo-realist artists, such as Malcolm Morley, Richard Estes, Richard Artschwager, and Duane Hanson, with whom he first became acquainted at the Dokumenta V (1972) in Kassel, Germany. Inspired by their pursuits of figuration in the heydays of abstract art, Balkenhol attempted to find his own interpretation of the human figure by employing a caricature-like style and humorous tone.

Balkenhol lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Meisenthal, France. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. (1995), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Saatchi Collection in London (1996), and the Arts Club of Chicago (1998), among many other museums and galleries