Lot 425 D

Gerhard Marcks was already appointed to the Bauhaus in 1919, where he founded and headed the ceramics class before moving on to Burg Giebichenstein one year later as a sculptor. The artist drew essential artistic impulses from the journeys he made to Italy and Greece in the second half of the 1920s - in the mid-1960s Marcks purchased a house on Aegina and subsequently spent much of his time there. Marcks's entire oeuvre is defined by the human figure. The captivating momentum of the body's turning and interweaving in space is an old sculptural theme - the ancient statue of the “Boy with Thorn” and the “Badende” by Wilhelm Lehmbruck can provide a chronological frame here - and this theme is also realised in the fragile counterbalancing of the figure's torsion in Marcks's sculpture of the “Sich Aufstützende”. Semi-abstract formal vocabulary and delineation of the subject matter make the visual idiom of Gerhard Marcks seem unmistakably and constantly recognisable.