Germany
Tilmann Krumrey
„I work in the stone quarry of human figure and have the heart of a poet.“
ARTIST STATEMENT
I explore what the human figure can become—and what we can discover through transforming it. My work begins with the conviction that its sculptural possibilities remain far from exhausted. We recognise a body immediately. This familiarity gives sculpture something fundamental to question: our certainty about where a person begins and ends, and what holds that person together.
I fuse bodies until a limb can belong to more than one person. I remove parts while preserving their action in the remaining figure. I develop forms whose bodily meaning changes with the viewer’s position. The body remains convincing enough to recognise, yet its familiar order becomes strange. What seemed to be a self-contained individual reveals another possibility within itself.
I pursue these transformations because I understand human beings as capable of containing their own opposites. In BRÃœDER, two bodies become inseparable. Looking up, the viewer faces a threatened blow; looking down, they stand above the dying victim. The sculpture draws them into both positions. A relationship that might otherwise remain an abstract thought becomes an experience involving their own body.
Such discoveries emerge through making. I work from drawings and models, then repeatedly alter the form and step back to examine what has appeared. The emerging work can overturn my intentions. I follow this process until the figure acquires a presence of its own and confronts me with something I have made but did not fully know beforehand.
My approach turns towards sculpture’s unexplored possibilities from within. I seek renewal by transforming the relationships that make a body recognisable, while sustaining its force as a living presence. The familiar becomes the site of an encounter with the unknown.
This is why I understand art as a path to knowledge. Making changes what I can perceive; the completed work opens that possibility to others. Its form allows us to experience something that an explanation alone cannot give us. Artistic freedom is essential to this process: the work must remain free to discover more than I intended.
The reason for working with tradional materials as clay, plaster, wax, bronze, stone, wood, lime is just that: I search for innovation within sculpture itself, not outside its boundaries. I focus inside the field of sculpture and, I don't escape from the sculptural problem: body, volume, space.
