Published by Kerber. Text by Nicole Fritz, Ninja Walbers.
Over the last three decades, German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol (born 1957) has sculpted a menagerie of human and animal figures from bronze and various woods. This publication unites new and previous works, focusing specifically on the artist's handling of gender.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Andreas Franzke.
German artist Stephan Balkenhol, known for his figurative wood sculptures, is responsible for some of our most idiosyncratic contemporary public art. Usually hewn out of poplar, his figures of humans, animals and animal-human hybrids--whether an innocuous-looking everyman or a mix of man and beast--are oddly both surreal and inconspicuous in the streets, squares and office corridors they populate. For example, Giraffe Man (2006)--a figure of a man with an elongated giraffe's neck--one of Balkenhol's best-known public pieces, conveys a peculiar, deadpan humor without crossing over to grotesquerie or sensation. This well-illustrated volume documents Balkenhol's public sculptures since 2000, and serves as a catalogue of all his sculptural work since 1984.
Stephan Balkenhol is best known for his roughly hewn wooden figurative sculptures of people and animals. Less well known are his functional objects, furniture and architectural works, including three-dimensional, colored reliefs that retrace Gothic cathedrals or anonymous Modern postwar architecture. All too long neglected, these works are detailed here.
Published by Dis Voir. Artwork by Stephan Balkenhol.
The artist Stephan Balkenhol has been producing polychromatic wood sculptures since 1980s, large-scale figures imbued with the artist's deadpan humor. His work renews questions about figuration and the representation of the human body in contemporary society. This thoughtful entry in the Plastic Arts Collection from Editions Dis Voir provides an examination of Balkenhol's work, his offbeat sensibility and the haunting vacancies of his sculptures.