HANS JOSEPHSOHN
Bleibtreustraße 45 & 15/16
17 November 2023 - 6 January 2024
Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Hans Josephsohn in the gallery spaces at Bleibtreustraße 45 and Bleibtreustraße 15/16, in Berlin.
Hans Josephsohn's work is characterised by his fascination with mass and form in space. Over the course of a six decade-long career, he continuously recalibrated dimensions and the relationship with their surroundings, by means of specific and repeatedly recurring forms. Josephsohn worked in distinct genres, among them the standing figure, the reclining figure, the half-figure and reliefs, as presented in the current exhibition. His sculptures are characterised by an urgent sense of physical materiality. For the artist, the human being manifested itself in the body, and human existence was characterised by its corporeality.
Josephsohn almost always worked directly from models, most of whom were wives or partners. Their names are sometimes included in the titles of the works, with two exhibited examples referencing ‘Ruth’ - Josephsohn’s most important model during the 1960s and early 1970s. These works seldom took on the physicality of portraits, and instead relied on impressions of the personality of his counterpart. He gradually moved from the almost abstract to the more figurative and back again. While Josephsohn's early works still retain the slender appearance of stelae, the artist later became interested in enhancing the volume and form of his figures by working with quick-drying plaster, which he had then cast in brass or bronze. Traces of his search for the perfect expression through form can be seen on the finished works in the additions and subtractions of material and in the imprints of his fingers.
The selection of works in the exhibition at Bleibtreustraße 45 is based on the architecture of the gallery, which was originally designed as a residential space. The sculptures and reliefs blend harmoniously into each room, calling attention to the proportions of the works within their surroundings. Josephsohn’s large half-figure Untitled (Ruth) from 1974-75 does not transgress this framework but instead emphasises the difference in scale between smaller works, including an intimately-sized standing figure from 1957, at just over 70 cm height. In the second room, various human and possibly sculptural figures are grouped together in a relief, with two sculptures in a similar style - a standing woman and a small half-figure - from the same artistic period placed opposite. The third room presents a small, figurative bust Untitled, 1969 beside a larger-than-life, strongly abstracted bust, revealing the fluid complexity of Josephsohn's approach to the genre of the half-figure. The last room is dominated by the sculptor's reclining figure Untitled, 1965 and the distinctly vertical orientation of the early stele, demonstrating the contrast between the horizontal and vertical orientation at play within his oeuvre. The exhibition is not structured chronologically, but is rather oriented towards the dialogues that develop between Josephsohn's sculptures and the surrounding architectural space.
The four large works exhibited in the gallery space across the road, on the ground floor of Bleibtreustraße 15/16, make reference to the urban setting of the gallery. Playing with the divide between the public and private domaine, the sculptures can be viewed outside opening hours from the street.
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16 окт 2024
