Joseph Beuys - Untitled (Hirsch) - image-1

Lot 413 R

Joseph Beuys - Untitled (Hirsch)

Auction 1014 - overview Cologne
24.05.2013, 11:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 30.000 € - 40.000 €
Result: 103.700 € (incl. premium)

Joseph Beuys

Untitled (Hirsch)
1962

Iron chloride, gilt bronze and pencil on chamois coloured paper collaged on chamois coloured paper. 20.6 x 32.8 cm on card support . Framed under glass. Signed and dated 'Beuys 1962' verso. - Traces of age.

Franz Joseph van der Grinten, long-time companion and commentator of Joseph Beuys's oeuvre, stresses the importance of drawings as the artist's direct medium of expression:
“A drawing, Joseph Beuys used to say, is the extension of a thought. Like a thought, it is autonomous in its specific expressive quality. Whenever drawing has not become solidified as a discipline of its own, as a craft, then - just like painting, with its detailed and fully exhaustive depictions of itself or of something else - is a mode of expression and therefore as original as speech. This is because it is the most immediate outflow of the mind, so that it takes its cue from the nature and genesis of form. In the same way, speech creates an intellectual context by giving shape to thought. It is the gradual solidification of thought through speech that Heinrich von Kleist once highlighted in an essay, comparing the thought-into-speech process to a smithy where an item is beaten into shape by a hammer, where sparks fly, where the item is stretched, where its edges gain shape and where it is eventually hardened. For Joseph Beuys a drawing was always a vehicle of communication, first for himself and later for others. Being an extension of a thought, a drawing embodies that thought and allows us to experience it with our senses.” (Franz Joseph van der Grinten, Zeichnung als Verlängerung des Gedankens, in: Friedhelm Mennekes (ed.), Franz Joseph van der Grinten zu Joseph Beuys, Cologne 1993, p.75)

Provenance

Heiner Bastian Collection, Berlin; Private Collection, Germany