Stephan Balkenhol's late exhibition consisted of 12 small female exposeds carved from a single shut up of wawa wood.

Stephan Balkenhol's late exhibition consisted of 12 small female exposeds carved from a single shut up of wawa wood. The figure and pedestal are all of a piece, and appear to be worked from inside the wood--a technique that recalls his 57 penguins from 1991 Additionally, there are sum of two units round pictures, two drawings, and a "headless man" that are the same size as the stark nakeds but in which the figures are largely clothed. (The headless man may be a regard to Dionysus of Paris, the third-century French martyr, who came to Paris from Rome and walked to St Denis with his head in his hand after being decapitated.) Together with three additional life-size female stark nakeds these works offer a comprehensive view into Balkenhol's world.

This world is varied, further somehow so closed off that the same can speak of a family resemblance among the different carved works It is not direct commonalities in the same manner much as related characteristics that recur; for example, Balkenhol's use of remarkably small male and female figures: the emphasis and evolution of body, figure, face, head. The work leaves us with an impression of physical and spiritual loneliness and the brains that these human figures have a spirit lending them a higher intent There is the question of mode of address of the influence of his teacher, Ulrich Ruckriem, and his [i]modus operandi[/i] of allowing simple forms to appear from the raw materials as form-giving factors; there is also the issue of an Expressionist heritage, of realistic expression, of formal and thematic reduction. Finally, there is the question of the relationship between the carves and language--Balkenhol's spectrum is firmly focused on the figurative image.

One papal courts throughout these sculptures the taming of a raw material--wood--by a direct, emotional, and positive controlling idea. It is speaked through the life of these ungainly beings, and their desire to live among us in the real physical world rather than as abstract, material art goals The friction between these sum of two units positions is grounded in the experience of a conceptual, intermediary reality in which the physical, biological, social, and historical reality of contemporary mankind is manifested.

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