Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff
Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff
Martin Matschinsky - Viertakt III - image-1

Lot 506 N

Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff Martin Matschinsky - Viertakt III

Auction 1122 - overview Cologne
01.12.2018, 14:00 - Contemporary Art I
Estimate: 80.000 € - 90.000 €
Result: 74.400 € (incl. premium)

Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff
Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff
Martin Matschinsky

Viertakt III
1969

Chromium-nickel steel. 157 x 194 x 188 cm. - Minor traces of age.

The work can be viewed in Berlin.
For further information: phone +49 30 27876080

The artist couple Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff have been working together since 1955. Their individual strengths allow them to create together an extraordinary, persistent sculptural work in which the line, the brass, copper and later chrome-nickel steel rod, always has its origin and its outcome. That which connects them and welds them is tin. Fine, freely and rhythmically-shaped rod elements develop dynamically to lively contradictions with ever enlarging bundles of thicker metal rods and tubes. The renunciation of classical casting techniques thus leads to completely different sculptural considerations which are subjected to virtually no specific growth limits by the material and its staging. This uniqueness and of course also the aesthetic experience, differentiates the artist couple from their sculptural contemporaries, who are the perfect team with a deep symbiosis for their work. From the mid-1950s, the artistic development of their work displays an obvious similarity to works by Antoine Pevsner who welded thin metal rods together to concave and convex volumes, the surfaces of which penetrate, interlock and bend. Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff knew of the idea of material modelled into suggestive bodies: after studying with Henry Moore in 1949/50 she worked in the studio of the Parisian sculptor.
In the mid-1960s, the cube appears as a radical element in their work. Simultaneously a contrasting and a connective element, it pushes itself in between the still moving tubes. In this case, four weighty cuboids tilt against each other, accumulate and build a central corpus, around which, or seemingly through, the pipe links tightly wind. The artist couple manage to combine two very different sections into a complex unit, giving the respective core elements of cube and rod a new representational, perhaps even human body association. An image with the idea, perhaps, in which the material interplay takes on a close bodily togetherness and in this explores the possibility of the possible. According to the writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer, “It (the body) is round and angular, quiet, yet agitated, man and machine simultaneously, and precisely through this diversity and ambiguity, a symbolic cipher of our time, which continually denies itself in order to escape the pathos”. (Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Notations on 'Herkules', in: exhib.cat.: Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Skulpturen und Zeichnungen 1955-1985, Akademie der Künste a.o., Berlin 1985, p.31).

Catalogue Raisonné

Schwarz 255

Provenance

Marlborough Galerie, Zurich

Literature

A. Germain, Deutsche Kunst und Künstler im 20. Jahrhundert, Paris 1970, p.128 with illus.

Exhibitions

Berlin 1970 (Nationalgalerie), Matschinsky-Denninghoff; Braunschweig 1970, Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Plastik und Zeichnung, exhib.cat.no.25, n.pag. with illus.; Marl 1970 (Rathaus), Mark '70 - Stadt und Skulptur, exhib.cat., n.pag. with illus.