The Kunsthalle Bielefeld’s exhibition of L’homme qui marche – Verkörperung des Sperrigen in the winter of 2019-20 is dedicated to sculpture. Starting with major pieces from our own sculpture collection and supplemented by first-rate works on loan, the show, which runs from November 9, 2019, to March 8, 2020, deals with sculpture’s embodiment of volume from the classic modern era to the present time, from Rodin to today. From the late nineteenth century onward, when Auguste Rodin finally invalidated the type of beauty idealized in the canon of ancient classical sculpture, the forms of sculpture that have continued to emerge always deal with the discrepancy between the traditionally “beautiful” and the increasingly “awkward or difficult,” in the sense of the abstract, the incomparable, and the visually contradictory.
Lena Henke’s piece, Ayşe Erkmen’s Endless Knee (2018) is an abstract translation of two crossed knees covered in brilliant green plastic granules. Not only can the sculpture be displayed outside, it can also be rolled around so that it intervenes in its environment. The title of the work alludes to the former professor at the Städelschule, whose large, site-specific interventions and installations are still an exception in this male-dominated field of art, and which influenced Henke while she was a student in Frankfurt.
