Bowdoin College Homepage
Bowdoin College Museum of Art Logo and Wordmark

Advanced Search
Preview image of work. Steel, mounted  on stone plinth,  Raumplastik 31529

2017.27

Recommend keywords

Help us make our collections more accessible by providing keywords to describe this artwork. The BCMA uses the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus to provide consistent keywords. Enter a keyword in the field below and you will be prompted with a list of possible matching AAT preferred terms.

 
 

Raumplastik

Export record as: Plain text | JSON | CDWA-Lite | VRA Core 4

Artist

Norbert Kricke (Düsseldorf, Germany, 11/30/1922 - 6/28/1984, Düsseldorf, Germany)

Title

Raumplastik

Creation Date

1958

Century

late 19th century

Dimensions

21 5/8 x 25 3/16 x 13 in. (55 x 64 x 33 cm)

Classification

Sculpture

Creation Place

Europe, Germany

Medium and Support

Steel, mounted on stone plinth

Credit Line

Gift of Elizabeth Cabot Lyman in honor of Bogislav von Wentzel

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

2017.27

Kricke was born in Düsseldorf in 1922 and grew up in Berlin. As a young man, he saw his city destroyed by World War II. By 1950, he had changed his sculptures radically. He discarded idealized figures made of clay and transformed the wire supports that had stabilized them into sculptures about space. His friend, the critic Sigfried Giedion, describes what this change meant: “A complex set of conditions is required to confine emptiness within such dimensions that a form is created which elicits an immediate emotional response. . . . The experience of ‘intangible space,’ the transformation of ‘inarticulate voids’ into an ‘emotional experience,’ relates to the works that Kricke created.” His new sculptures reach into space, they define it, but they do not enclose it. They portray movement, but without parts that actually move, and, as the eye follows the steel rods, the passage of time is suggested as well. Elizabeth Lyman, friend of the artist and former co-director, Galerie Wentzel, Hamburg and Cologne

Additional Media

Additional Image overall
overall