Gift of Elizabeth Cabot Lyman in honor of Bogislav von Wentzel
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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
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