Stephan Balkenhol

Weiblicher Akt (2012)

German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol was born in Frizlar in 1957. Between 1976 and 1982 he attended the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, and since 1991 he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.
His first solo exhibition dates from 1983 and was held in the Löhrl Gallery in Mönchengladbach. Since then he has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. His work belongs to many private and public collections across the world.

Stephan Balkenhol has been concentrating on the human figure for over two decades and began his sculptural process of figurative wood carving in the mid-eighties. His first figurative wooden sculptures of single male or female nudes attached to pedestals placed the human figure at the centre of his work and reintroduced it in contemporary sculpture, in contrast with the abstract and minimalist tradition of the time. In the 1990s he added animals, hybrids and architectural scenes, all carved from single wood blocks. The artist uses a hammer and chisel to carve his figures out of a tree trunk, leaving the shavings and traces of the tools visible in the wood. He then uses paint to structure the sculpture and accentuate the anatomy, without adding any expressiveness, and leaving much of the natural wood exposed. Balkenhol has been representing contemporary figures, either as free-standing sculptures or reliefs in wood, of the everyday man or woman in order to strip them of any narrative content and onto which the viewer is able to project his own image. They are understated humans or animals, devoid of any individual expression, seeming both familiar and anonymous, solitary and distant.
Stephan Balkenhol has reinvented figurative sculpture by mixing the traditions of European woodcraft with a modern and contemporary discourse, making him one of the most original and inventive sculptors of his time.
Balkenhol has been awarded the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Grant, the Baden-Württemberg International Prize and the Bremen Art Prize. The artist lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Meisenthal, France.