Kubach-Wilmsen

Homage to Tolstoy (2003). Bad Munster am Stein

Wolfgang Kubach (born January 9, 1936 ; † April 24, 2007 ) and Anna Maria Kubach-Wilmsen (born January 13, 1937 in Appeldorn ) were a German sculptor couple.

Life

They studied together from 1959 to 1965 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 1965 the couple bought the old church in Hackenheim as a studio. From 1968 they lived and worked together as a stone carving team in Bad Münster am Stein . From 1976 the “stone books” became the main formal idea of the two sculptors. A frequently quoted sentence by Anna Kubach-Wilmsen vividly describes the artistic intention that the stone books should show the “content” of the stone, its materiality: “A book is held by the hand and read with the eyes. A stone book is held by the eyes and read by hand. "

Initially there were stone books in all sizes, including the scroll, the fallen or thrown book that landed roughly like "Icarus", and finally the ruined book. Stone newspapers, stone sheets, stone tablets and, under the title Support des rêves , slumped stacks of stone paper followed. A large stone library of 316 stone books (1983) found its place in the French National Library (BnF) in Paris. Perhaps the most important work is the granite library La Storia della Terra , which was shown for the first time in Rome in 1992 in an exhibition at Villa Massimo . Stone bay towers made of around 50 different types of marble and granite from all five continents are represented in well-known museum collections.

The artistic oeuvre of the sculptors Kubach-Wilmsen is now almost 40 years of homage to stone, they understand stone as a relic of a million-year history of the creation of the earth. Anna Kubach-Wilmsen and Wolfgang Kubach have created large sculptures at home and abroad and have taken part in many international stone sculptor symposiums . Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions from Japan to the USA.

In 1998 they founded the Kubach-Wilmsen Foundation to create a stone sculpture museum at the foot of the Rotenfelsen in Bad Münster am Stein based on designs by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and a stone sculpture park, which opened on August 14, 2010 with an open day.

Both artists participated as members of the German Association of Artists between 1978 and 1983 in the large annual DKB exhibitions, where they exhibited under the name Kubach-Wilmsen-Team . Their daughter is Livia Kubach (* 1966), who is part of the sculptor duo Kubach & Kropp .

Awards

In 2014 the Kubach-Wilmsen-Team received the art award of the Ike and Berthold Roland Foundation.
In 2017 Anna Kubach-Wilmsen received the Max Slevogt Medal .

Exhibitions (selection)

1978 Frankfurt Book Fair
1978 Gutenberg Museum , Mainz
1982 Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf
1985 Staempfli Gallery, New York
1993 Yamaki Gallery, Osaka and Tokyo
2000 Henze & Ketterer Gallery , Wichtrach / Bern
2002 German Architecture Museum , Frankfurt
2004 Eberbach Monastery
2005 Galerie Thomas , Munich
2007 Henze & Ketterer Gallery, Wichtrach / Bern
2007 Inselgalerie Rettbergsaue, Wiesbaden
2007 Wally Findlay Gallery, New York
2015–16 Anna Kubach-Wilmsen - stone sculptures , Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Riedberg campus, science garden (until October 2016)

Photo gallery

Earth column (1971). Street of Sculptures (St. Wendel)
Endless Pillar (1976). Marble. Heinz-Beck-Hof, in front of the city library, Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Steinbuch Hommage à Gutenberg (1978). La Spezia marble . Property of the Gutenberg Museum Collection . Location: in front of the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz
Steinbuch, Germersheim