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Heinz Breloh    "Die Anwesenheit des Bildhauers"


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What may fit in well with this is the fact that the artist – after his pronouncedly ‘classic’ sculpture studies (under Gustav Seitz 1961-1963 in Hamburg and Fritz Wotruba 1964-1968 in Vienna) – in the late 1960s turned to experimental working methods. Breloh’s pieces from this period open themselves to the then-‘new’ media, photography and video, and additionally expand into the field of performance, happenings and installations. Photography, here, has a documentary function, but Breloh also creates media-reflexive pieces staged for photographic depiction.

 What helps recognising the topicality of this artistic approach is to discover his sculptures as a grandiose achievement of synthesis in the impressive intensity of Breloh’s works, and to reconstruct –




behind their gesture of authenticity and directness, which is maintained even in the bronze casts of his sculptures kneaded into and rubbed out of the modelling clay and shaped in a dance-like way into sculptures – an indeed highly specific form of mediality using sculpture as an example, so to say. Heinz Breloh always also theoretically reflected upon his profoundly conceptual understanding of sculpture. A note in his notebook “für Krimhild“ (1988) reads: ‘Choreography is the geometry that starts to live when being performed; it then loses its unconditionality and totalitarian claim. Rationality and organicity merge to an adventure." 

  (from: Hans–Jürgen Hafner, Zum Medium machen, June 2012)