Klaus Rinke (1939)
Germany
Biography :
"Born in 1939 in Wattenscheid (Germany). He lives and works in Austria and the United States.
Klaus Rinke is one of the major figures of German and international art. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf from 1974 to 2005.
Seeking to apprehend and understand reality in its physical and material dimension, a large part of his work focuses on making perceptible the main abstract notions which underpin our relationship with the world: time, space, gravitation.
It was in this spirit of experimentation that he carried out numerous performances in the 1970s using his own body as a tool to test these three essential notions. These performances contributed to the development of a simple, refined visual language which brings back elementary shapes, gestures and energies. The clock, a recurring form and object in the work of Klaus Rinke, is thus used both for its obvious relationship to counted time, and for its simple and perfect geometric shape, circular, with a central point around which the notions of time and space.
Treated by the artist as a material in its own right, water is also a predominant theme in his work. A material always in motion, whose energy, physical laws and vital symbolism Klaus Rinke uses in installations and sculptures “in action”.
If Klaus Rinke's sculpture and performance work sits on the border between science and art, his graphite paintings and drawings are an investigation into "form". These works combine abstraction and organic, biological reminiscences. “Pre-embryonic”, mixing humans, animals and plants, they bear witness to a quest for the origin of things."
(Source, website, CCCOD)
(Biography by the artist himself : website)