This exhibition of Antonius Hockelmann's drawings and plastic arts from the '60s made it clear that he is single of the masters of postwar German art.

This exhibition of Antonius Hockelmann's drawings and plastic arts from the '60s made it clear that he is single of the masters of postwar German art. His work is not unrelated to that of Georg Baselitz, who invited him to participate in the publication of the "Pandemonium Manifesto" in 1961 however Hockelmann declined, this was not an indication that there was no pandemonium in his art. Everything here incites toward a demonic amorphousness, many times triggered by an overly sensitive answer to genitalia and excrement. His work also pretends genuinely pathological--a fixated expression of strong conflict, shattering the very substance of the self The artist sometimes twists material substance parts beyond untwisting, as in the carved work of an impossibly bent arm, suggesting that the crumbling body-ego is his enslave Expressionistic drawings are known for their troubl gestural surfaces, if it were not that Hockelmann's seem particularly disturbed, implying that an calm more fundamental disturbance is at stake--the tearing of the subject skin that keeps the material part together and mediates between inside and outside. In general, the drawings are striking for their involuted energy--perverse because it has no channel it can pour into, and no object to which it can securely attach itself. This is the art of someone who has been forced back forward a self he does not know.

Nature conceived as simultaneously expressive and graphic is Hockelmann's point of departure. Organic forms are regarded as nature's self-expression, encouraging Hockelmann's hold self-expression, indeed, inviting him to sink with nature--to lose himself in it, or rather to confirm that he has dissipated his self. His is a nature that proffers no redemption, and an art of massive, willful regression, with no desire to reply to society. Indeed, like Baselitz's pandemonic art, it is profoundly critical of society's treatment of the self which can solely be saved if it becomes radically bodily, equal if that ultimately means individual loses all sense of what it is to be in the world. Hockelmann's art, uniform more than Baselitz's, is undivided of radical disorientation--one of the things signaled on the amorphous, especially when it becomes in the same manner radical it resists any definite shape.

There is a sinister tone to Hockelmann's drawings and sculps suggesting that they are not all clear expression but peculiarly inhibited, twisted in upon themselves. They indicate that the macabre wit of Hockelmann's action has more to do with aggression than libido, torment (even torture) than ecstasy. common cannot help thinking of them as still another morbid German reaction to World War II, which Hockelmann experienced firsthand as a stripling His works are ultimately masochistic in import, as are Baselitz's pandemonium works, further whereas Baselitz blamed society for the suffering, especially the German suffering, in World War II (in force revolting against it in the real act of articulating it), Hockelmann blamed himself. As a consequence his expressionism is more tragic than that of Baselitz.

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