Alexander Archipenko

The Ukrainian-American artist Alexander Archipenko is counted among the most important avant-garde sculptors of the first half of the 20th century. Following studies in Kiev and Moscow, Archipenko worked in various European locations from 1908 onwards: in Paris, where he came into contact with the French avant-garde, he became a temporary member of the “Section d’Or”, in Germany, where he exhibited in the Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” as well as the Folkwang-Museum. In 1923, he finally immigrated to the USA where he continued with the work of art education that he had started in Europe. He founded an art school in New York and Los Angeles and taught at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Archipenko’s sculpture works comprised elements of Cubism on the one hand, transferring the abstract geometrisation to the sculpture and from 1912 onwards to his “sculpto-paintings”, and on the other hand it comprises elements of Constructivism, which he refers to from 1924 onwards in his “Archipentura” in which he fathoms the boundaries of painting and sculpture. From 1946, the artist explores the use of light in illuminated sculptures made of plexiglass. Abstraction and stylisation, the tension between form and space, statics and dynamics characterise Archipenko’s multiform work which rates among the most innovative formulations of avant-garde sculpture.