Leonard Lorenz
Leonard Lorenz (born February 28, 1948 in Tristach , Tyrol ) is an Austrian sculptor and painter . His sculptures and paintings have been shown in international art exhibitions in Europe and the USA. He lives and works in Neufahrn near Hohenschäftlarn , district of Munich , where his studio, the “Artforum Lorenz”, is also located.
Life
Leonard Lorenz - before his name change in 1983, Lorenz Wendlinger - was born as the second son of a farming family in Tristach, Tyrol. At the age of thirteen he made the decision to become an artist. The first autodidactic carvings were made, among them the body of a figure of Christ on the cross created in 1963. From 1964 to 1968 he completed an apprenticeship in wood carving at the state school for wood carving in Elbigenalp . From 1970 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich , first with Georg Brenninger and then as a master student with Hans Ladner . In 1976 he completed his studies with a diploma “with outstanding artistic performance” and worked as a freelance artist first in East Tyrol and then in Munich .
Lorenz experienced the time after 1989 as a profound change and upheaval, after a life crisis had led to health problems, especially with the eyes and forced him to take a break. He could no longer see three-dimensionally, and sculpting was not possible for a long time until he recovered. Instead, he increasingly turned to painting, and from 1996 decidedly assigned it the same status as sculpture - many of his pictorial works correspond to sculpture as a content-oriented component.
He has been working in his studio in Neufahrn near Munich since the mid-1990s, from which the "Artforum Lorenz" emerged in 2005. In the same year he married the violinist Andrea Schumacher, who completed her music studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and has been a member of the Munich Chamber Orchestra since 2002 . Lorenz and Schumacher have a son (* 2005). In the "Artforum Lorenz" they regularly organize cultural programs in which visual art, music and literature enter into a symbiosis.
plant
At the Elbigenalp carving school, Leonard Lorenz first got to know the basic path to anatomy based on plastic models, but there was still no free work there. The depiction of a “Christ on the cross” for the chapel of the dead in the parish church in Tristach, built in 1971, meant for the 23-year-old, for the first time after the journeyman's examination in 1968, “to leave the level of conforming patterns and not only allow the freedom of the possibly provocative form to be interpreted leave. "
With his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich , Lorenz initially focused on the living model. The teaching approach of his professor Hans Ladner was related to Oskar Kokoschka's - “Learning to see from things” - and influenced Lorenz's further work. The study of nature, nude modeling and understanding a body played an important role. The result were life-size sculptures, mostly hand-modeled: standing, lying, intertwined men and women formed a conceptual experience with the plasticity of the human body. In painting, he took up this anatomical proximity and transferred it from the three-dimensionality of the sculpture to the plane of the picture. During his time at the Academy of Fine Arts, he also showed his talent for portraiture. In 1976 he created the bronze sculptures Portrait of my mother and a sculpture by the Italian Father Pios , a commission based on photos.
As a freelance artist in Munich, he created his first major works for public clients from the 1980s. These include the figure composition Metamorphose for the gynecological clinic in Innsbruck (1984–1986), the bronze sculptures Focus I for Deutsche Telekom in Frankfurt-Eschborn (1992) and Focus II for the community of Langenargen on Lake Constance (1994) as well as Catalysis , a work commissioned by Ludwig -Maximilians University of Munich in honor of the Nobel laureate in chemistry, Professor Gerhard Ludwig Ertl (2008).
Through his acquaintance with Josef Zenzmaier , Leonard Lorenz got to know a new technique of bronze casting. In 1983 he was awarded the Wiener Festwochen Prize for bronze sculpture for the work that he created afterwards, and in 1991 he was awarded the Honorary Prize of the City of Salzburg . The interest of the public is also reflected in the numerous stops on its exhibition presence. In 1970, in his first semester as an academy student, he succeeded in his first solo exhibition with 28 exhibits in the Städtische Galerie in Lienz. Solo exhibitions and participation in presentations followed, such as in 1978 in the Georg-Trakl-Haus in Salzburg, 1981 and later in 1991 in the Munich Haus der Kunst ; 1984 at the Carinthian Summer in Ossiach, 1986 in the Munich Residence , 1988 at Schloss Bruck in Lienz. Furthermore, by invitation in 1989 a highly regarded solo exhibition in the Dome Gallery in New York and repeatedly in the Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery in Bielefeld. In the 1990s, his works of art were shown at Art Frankfurt , the Galerie M and LEO.COPPI Gallery in Berlin , the FIAC in Paris and Art Basel, among others.
His engagement with authors such as Franz Kafka and Dante Alighieri was reflected in several works. In 2004, for example, his paintings on Dante's Divine Comedy , Beatrice , Virgil and the Purgatorium were shown in the Galleria La Pigna in Rome . To give painting the same status as sculpture turned out to be a blessing for Lorenz, according to his own admission, "because this parallel artistic creation mutually enriched each other enormously". Time and again there are complementary moments, sound spaces which, with the coloring, create a deepening of the sculptural effect of the picture, as in the 2002 composition Überbrückung .
The range of sculptural and painterly work by Leonard Lorenz is diverse and yet carried by a formal guiding principle. The accord between object and space and the interplay of volume and shell, of inside and outside, become key positions in his intuition. His work stimulates many senses, due to his multi-layered creativity, which comes into play in terms of form, but above all in terms of content. Lorenz does not criticize the environment with his works, rather he admits that he can and will only change himself in order to manifest a counterpoint to the technocracy of the world. He himself describes his work as the merging of vita activa and vita contemplativa . For him, leaving the “busy dynamic of time” means the chance to develop a differentiated and multi-layered potential, which, in his opinion, can only arise from a deeper understanding of oneself. According to Lorenz, it is only by looking inward that it is possible “to track down deep-seated and often barely tangible patterns in order to then create something believable new in front of oneself”. In this way he sets himself apart from a pseudo-modern art that tries to match the spirit of the times and the ideas of the art market: "For me there is only authenticity, so the question of being modern no longer arises."
Awards
- 1983: Wiener Festwochen Prize for bronze sculpture
- 1991: Honorary Prize of the City of Salzburg
Public contracts (selection)
- Portrait Shackleton, Reinhold Messner Museum, Bolzano, Italy
- Focus I. Telekom headquarters, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
- Metamorphosis. Wall sculpture in the women's clinic Innsbruck, Austria
- Catalysis. Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany
- Butterfly fountain. Lienz, Austria
- Focus II. Langenargen (Lake Constance), Germany
- Transparency of being. Landtag Klagenfurt, Austria
- oT well. Erfurt, Germany
- Dolomite golf. Fountain. Lavant, Austria
Exhibitions (selection)
- 2011: University of Music, Munich (solo exhibition)
- 2010: Hofburg, Innsbruck (solo exhibition)
- 2008: Galerie Kunsthalle Hosp, Nassereith (solo exhibition)
- 2006: Maluramuseum, Oberdießen (solo exhibition)
- 2005: University of Music, Munich (solo exhibition)
- 2004: Galerie la Pigna, Rome (solo exhibition)
- 2002: Galerie Groll Naarden, Netherlands (solo exhibition)
- 1999: Gallery Spitalskirche Lienz (solo exhibition)
- 1996: Galerie Ludwig Lange, Berlin (solo exhibition)
- 1995: Fiac, Paris
- 1994: Art Frankfurt
- 1994: Salon de Mars, Paris
- 1993: Art Frankfurt
- 1992: Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie, Bielefeld (solo exhibition)
- 1992: Städtische Galerie, Lienz (solo exhibition)
- 1992: "Galerie M", National Gallery Berlin (solo exhibition)
- 1992: Galerie Leo Coppi, Berlin
- 1991: House of Art, Munich
- 1990: Art Hamburg
- 1989: Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie, Bielefeld (solo exhibition)
- 1989: Sculpture Gallery Messer-Ladwig, Berlin (solo exhibition)
- 1989: Dome Gallery, New York (solo exhibition)
- 1988: Galerie Zentrum, Vienna
- 1988: Bruck Castle, Lienz (solo exhibition)
- 1988: Art Basel
- 1987: House of Art, Art 87, Munich
- 1986: Edition de Beauclaire, Munich
- 1986: Munich Residence (solo exhibition)
- 1985: Galerie Ruf, Munich
- 1984: Carinthischer Sommer, Ossiach, Austria (solo exhibition)
- 1983: Orangerie Gallery, Vienna
- 1983: Galerie Heseler, Munich
- 1982: Tyrolean Art Pavilion , Innsbruck (solo exhibition)
- 1982: Städtische Galerie Lienz (solo exhibition)
- 1981: Galerie Neuhausen, Munich (solo exhibition)
- 1981: House of Art Munich
- 1978: Georg Trakl House, Salzburg
- 1970: Städtische Galerie, Lienz (solo exhibition)
Publications (selection)
- Leonard Lorenz: ... born like a game from the depths ... From staying power for art; Sculptures and paintings 1963–2013. With comments by Gert Ammann, Rudolf Seitz and Heinz Friedrich. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-87490-755-2 .
literature
- Eleonora Bliem-Scolari: Leonard Lorenz - sculptor and painter. Positions of an inside look. In: Osttiroler Heimatblätter, 9/2008.
- Heinz Friedrich: “It continues beyond the horizon” - comments on the sculptures by Leonard Lorenz.
- Wolfgang Längfeld: Difficult way - sculptures by Lorenz Wendlinger in the Neuhausen gallery. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 10, 1981.
Remarks
- ^ Eleonora Bliem-Scolari: Leonard Lorenz - Sculptor and Painter - Positions of an Inside Look. In: Osttiroler Heimatblätter, 9/2008.
- ↑ Leonard Lorenz: ... born like a game from the depths ... From staying power for art; Sculptures and paintings 1963–2013. With comments by Gert Ammann, Rudolf Seitz and Heinz Friedrich. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-87490-755-2 , p. 67.
- ↑ So the assessment of Gert Ammann, former director of the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck, ibid., P. 12.
- ↑ Gert Ammann, ibid., P. 8.
- ↑ Ibid., P. 176 f.
- ↑ Ibid., P. 231.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lorenz, Leonard |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wendlinger, Lorenz (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian sculptor and painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 28, 1948 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tristach , Tyrol |