Colourful Stones. William Tucker, Kai Schiemenz, Stefan Guggisberg

In the exhibition ‘Bunte Steine’, the Georg Kolbe Museum presents three outstanding voices in contemporary art. It brings together around 30 works by the sculptors William Tucker and Kai Schiemenz, as well as the painter Stefan Guggisberg. The exhibition takes up the idea of a collection of stones, as explored by Adalbert Stifter in his collection of short stories ‘Bunte Steine’, published in 1853. In the book, each story bears the name of a stone: granite, limestone, tourmaline, rock crystal, cat’s silver and mountain milk. In the stories, these stones serve as pivotal points for the depicted courses of human life in harmony with nature. The works on display in the exhibition are likewise akin to a collection of stones: the three artists repeatedly take up the motif of the stone in their work.

William Tucker (b. 1935), a native of Britain, is one of the most internationally recognised sculptors of his generation. His bronze figures embody a powerful language that straddles figuration and abstraction: they draw equally on human forms and geological rock formations. They engage the viewer and provoke existential questions. The Berlin-based artist Kai Schiemenz (b. 1966) has been working with glass for many years. He translates natural formations made of rubble stone into this unique material. The translucent quality of the coloured glass lends them the character of precious stones and draws the eye into an animated depth. Schiemenz belongs to a younger generation of artists who are reimagining the classical medium of sculpture and its multi-layered dimensions within a 21st-century context. The Swiss-born painter Stefan Guggisberg (*1980), who works in Leipzig, creates intoxicating spaces of colour in his oil works on paper. Like Tucker and Schiemenz, the artist has repeatedly engaged with the motif and materiality of stone. In his brilliant paintings, the concrete object expands into atmospheric sensory impressions, whilst he explores the extremes between sharpness and blurriness. Whether as a colossal cast bronze sculpture by Tucker, a fragile glass object by Schiemenz, or a composition of colour particles by Guggisberg: here, the fundamental contrasts of simplicity and grandeur, massiveness and delicacy, come together. Through their powerful yet tranquil presence in the space, these works confront their human counterparts with their very existence in the world. This existential examination is perpetually relevant and universal, and for this reason, too, it holds social significance in an age of increasingly fleeting values.