Lot 394 D

Anton Hiller was born in Munich in 1893 and was among the important German sculptors of the twentieth century. Initially committed to a more traditional sculptural treatment of the figure, from the 1960s his works were distinguished primarily by their unmistakably fragmentary and tectonic structure and a turn to the geometry of the body. Regarding his own process of arriving at forms, Hiller summarily explained: “During my independent work, pieces of early Greek, Egyptian, Romanesque and early Gothic sculpture were always present in my mind: stylistic directions that pointed me towards the problem of that primal form which has always occupied me. Looking from there I saw possibilities for turning my sculptural ideas into form in a free and independent manner. On the basis of these underlying forms, I strove to arrive at new compositional possibilities through the interaction of bodies and spaces. During my progressive development towards simplification, works emerged that were cubic, almost architectonic in terms of their fundamental spirit, but still allowed the natural appearance of things to be recognised.” (Anton Hiller, Anmerkungen zu meiner Arbeit, in: exhib. cat. Anton Hiller: Skulpturen und Handzeichnungen, Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern 1974, n. pag.).
In our column figure, Hiller varies the length of the legs and subtly shifts them towards one another to dynamise the symmetry of the body in a thoroughly effective manner, differentiating their fine and nonetheless stable volumes with a crusty, archaic-looking surface. The modelling based on a few starkly reduced fundamental elements demonstrates the radical ease with which Hill was able to invoke a repertoire of forms that was rooted in the dichotomous relationship between figure and architecture and which stretched back for millennia - from antiquity to the sculpture of Brancusi or Schlemmer.