TAB Event - Stephan Balkenhol Exhibition

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At Tomio Koyama Gallery
Media: Painting, Sculpture

Sculptor Stephan Balkenhol carves giant tree trunks to free the humans and animals trapped within. They stand in front of sculpted reliefs of landscapes and geometric patterns with distant expressions.
These include sculptures of enlarged human heads, portraits in relief, and fanciful animals. The spark that led to these various forms was created during the 1970s and 80s, during the minimal and conceptual art movements, and it continues in Balkenhol's style of wooden sculptures. The roughly-carved surface and the bold process of sculpting results in a reality that is stripped to its most basic form of representation. The combination of background relief and foreground sculpture lead to an experimental display of both the second and third dimensions. Whether a sculpture contains a solitary figure or a group, Balkenhol repeats the production of constructing spaces, which results in works that speak volumes about contemporary life.

This exhibition features 14 new sculptures, including one backed by a large 9 m2 relief and one that measures 2 meters tall. 10 drawings will be also shown.

Stephan Balkenhol was born in 1957, in Fritzlar, Hessen, West Germany. He studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg between 1976 and 1982. He now lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany and Meisenthal, France. He has served as a professor of sculpture at Staatliche Kunstakademie in Karlsruhe since 1992.
His first exhibition in Japan, Stephan Balkenhol: : Skulpturen und Reliefs, was held in 2005 at the National Museum of Art, Osaka and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
Other major individual exhibitions have been featured at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2007, Austria), Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (2006, Germany), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2003, Germany), and Le Rectangle and Goethe Institute, Lyon (2003, France).
His other major group exhibitions include "Figures in the Field: Figurative Sculpture and Abstract Painting from Chicago Collections"(MCA Chicago, 2006) and "Durchgehend geöffnet"(Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Sammlung Frieder, touring in Germany,2003).

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