KARSTEN KONRAD

KARSTEN KONRAD

Born in Würzburg in 1962, he studied art at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, as well as fine art sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London and at the Berlin University of the Arts under David Evison and Marina Abramović. He has presented and exhibited his works worldwide – he is a professor of sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts. Karsten Konrad lives and works in Berlin.

“In the exhibition at Werner Tammen, we see his works from the past 15 years: plenty of black, silver, stainless steel, chrome, mirrors, and occasionally aluminium, plastic, wood and Resopal – condensed into marvellous final chords that capture the duality of spontaneity and construction. Karsten Konrad is a master of circular thinking. His artistic strategy essentially consists of bestowing new recognition and meaning upon the seemingly useless, that is, adding and combining existing elements into new arrangements. He presents assemblages and montages that are the result of experimentation with formal resources and a system of rules according to which visual building blocks in art and design are structured and understood …”

(quoted from the opening speech by Christoph Tannert)

‘How does he arrive at these forms?’ Christoph Tannert goes on to ask: Karsten Konrad also mentions the sculptor Lothar Fischer, a founding member of the ‘SPUR Group’ in 1957, who made a name for himself with abstract helmet-shaped forms in bronze. Key sources of inspiration for him in the field of abstract sculpture include his professor David Evison at Berlin’s University of the Arts (UdK) and artists such as David Smith, who as early as the 1930s assembled tools and machine parts in a ‘painterly’ manner, as well as Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow and Richard Wentworth. They all transformed the traditional definition of sculpture by combining and manipulating everyday objects and industrial found objects in ways that deviated from their original purpose. Through these so-called ‘assisted readymades’, they broke down conventional classifications and drew attention – in a humorous yet profound way – to the poetry and unconscious gestures of our existence …