Lot 607 D

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In 1959, the artist couple Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff received the first Prix Bourdelle, named after the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, and as a result moved in 1961 into a studio in the rue Cels in the 14th arrondissement in Paris. One of the sculptures produced here was the monumental Afrika IV, exhibited in the German pavilion in Venice in 1962.
The artists had been working together since 1955. Their individual talents allow them together to design unusual, forceful sculptural works in which the line, the rod in brass, copper and later chrome-nickel steel, is always the source and the exit. The connecting element that welds them together is tin. The fine, freely and rhythmically-shaped rod elements develop dynamically into lively contrasts with ever increasing clustering of thicker metal rods and tubes. With time, they lose the habitus of modelling and change into solid constructions of surfaces and shapes.
From the 1950s, the artistic development of their work showed an obvious correlation to works by Antoine Pevsner, in whose studio Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff worked following her studies, and who soldered thin metal rods together to make concave and convex volumes, the surfaces of which penetrate, interlock and bend. Meier-Denninghoff already knew of this use of malleable material to create suggestive bodies from her student days with Henry Moore in 1949/50. With this in mind, her works from 1961/62 in Paris, with tall rod elements forming a skin around a cavity, radiate a dense corporeality, which regain a playful lightness through the contours frayed at the top and bottom. “The structure pattern”, says Johannes Langner about Matschinsky-Denninghoff's sculpture in 1992, “can be compared to the French brick Gothic such as the exterior of Albi Cathedral, without naming it as a direct source of inspiration. The artists themselves allude to a different direction with the title Afrika, which they gave to a number of works of this type. It suggests a wickerwork of vegetable material which would soon stretch like a pole, as if pulled together around its own axis by an inner suction, before long, voluminous, a structure between basket and hut”. (Johannes Langner, Wandel und Entfaltung, Zum plastischen Werk von Matschinsky-Denninghoff, in: Georg-W. Költzsch, Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Monographie und Werkverzeichnis der Skulpturen, Cologne 1992, p.94).