"Born in 1921, Joseph Beuys was the perfect age to fight for Hitler and he did, with the wounds to prove it. The Andy Warhol portraits that complement this exhibition, without actually being part of it, brutally catch his gaunt, ravaged face in the glare of a photo flash under the hat he wore to hide burns sustained in a plane crash while serving in the Luftwaffe."
"Who would want to take a bath in this? The sculpture at the heart of this exhibition, Bathtub, is a massive steampunk metal tank with protruding pipes and valves, the inside rumpled and mottled like human flesh, the entire grotesque structure resting on a giant mammoth tooth. Cast from a design Beuys tinkered with from 1961 to near the end of his life,"
"This was in the 1970s when Beuys was a charismatic one-man artistic revolution, inspiring young Germans to plant trees, lecturing about flows of ecological and human energy and, in breathtaking performances, speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote. All that remains today of those actions, protests and performances are posters, preserved scrawls on blackboards and mesmerising videos."
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 and fought in WWII, sustaining burns in a Luftwaffe plane crash that he concealed beneath a hat. Andy Warhol portraits capture his gaunt, ravaged, haunted face. In the 1970s Beuys led a charismatic artistic revolution, inspiring tree planting, lecturing on ecological and human energy flows, and performing acts such as speaking to a dead hare or spending a week locked in a cage with a coyote. After his disappearance and death in 1986 his material sculptures became dominant. Bathtub is a massive steampunk-like metal tank, mottled like human flesh and resting on a mammoth tooth, evoking twentieth-century horrors.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]