Stephan Huber

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Shadow speaker, 2009, Kunstmuseum Bonn, detail (self-portrait of the artist with ventriloquist dummy)
Working in Reichtum 3 and 7 , Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1983
I love you , 1983, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
shining , 2004, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) Vienna, installation view (model of the artist's parents' house)
8.5 room apartment for artist, 49 years , 2002, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Munich, detail
Gran Paradiso , 1997 ( New Fair Munich )
Two horses for Münster , 2002 ( LVM Landwirtschaftlicher Versicherungsverein Münster )
The Great Shine , 2006 ( Künstlerhaus Hannover )

Stephan Huber (* 1952 in Lindenberg im Allgäu ) is a German sculptor and object artist . His mostly large-format works, often realized in public space , generalize autobiographical motifs into universal symbols of social or emotional states that go beyond the private sphere. With their opulent catholic imagery, Huber's works place themselves in the tradition of the baroque world theater, specifically Bavarian.

Life

Between 1971 and 1978 Huber studied with Horst Sauerbruch at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich . 1980–1981 he spent a year on a scholarship at PS1 in New York. After his first solo exhibitions at the Lenbachhaus in Munich , the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster and the Bonner Kunstverein , he took part in Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987 . 1989–1990 he taught as a visiting professor at the Art Academy in Karlsruhe. Harald Szeemann invited him in 1999 to realize a large installation in the former naval base, the Arsenale , at the Biennale di Venezia . Since 2004, Huber has been the successor to James Reineking , whose chair he previously represented, professor at the Munich Art Academy. In the same year, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts selected him as a member of the visual arts class. Stephan Huber is married and has two daughters, he lives in Munich and in Ostallgäu. His work has received numerous awards, including the Roland Prize for Art in Public Spaces (Bremen, 2007) and the City of Munich Art Prize (2008).

Artistic work

Stephan Huber's work, which has developed from plastic and spatial beginnings since the mid-1980s to a great media breadth, includes objects and installations as well as graphics, films, performative projects and puppet theater pieces. His works are characterized by a rich, narrative language that condenses their far-reaching autobiographical, art-historical, political, or literary references into concise, archetypal images. In this way, Huber always creates personally colored, but at the same time universally legible and emotionally tangible "iconographies in which a high intellectual and aesthetic claim is combined with immediate comprehensibility." The sometimes pathetic overwhelming aesthetic that is used is at the same time through humorous disclosure of yours Mechanism broken and humanized through ironic distancing or an unexpected turn of events.

The recurring metaphors in Huber's work include neutrally white models of alpine peaks modeled exactly to scale, which, isolated from their context, remain as archaic original sculptural forms and, in their ambivalence of beauty and threat, are linked to the romantic conception of the sublime ( Gran Paradiso , New Fair Munich , 1997; Depositopo , Venice Biennale , 1999); oversized hats that both shield and float like the swords of Damocles over the heads of the beholder ( Grünes Dach , Coburg, 1998); or candelabra swaying to and fro, which transform an order, taken for no alternative, into an imponderable state of constant uncertainty , like Buridan's donkey from one extreme to the other ( Acta non verba , Villa Demidoff, Pratolino, 1986; Sleep Of The Reason , Royal Scottish Academy Edinburgh, 1987).

Playing with the irritating alienation, which makes supposed certainties fragile and thus makes them aware and questioning them, is characteristic of Huber's work. "In the tradition of Munich Dadaism", Huber's sculptures and installations work with the reversal of the usual context (a chandelier hangs between house facades: The great glow , forecourt of the Künstlerhaus Hannover , 2006), with shifts in size (mountain models move far away within reach: From the Bergs , Villa Jauss Oberstdorf, 2003; oversized hats make the viewer shrink, tiny doors force him to stoop as he walks through : Ichkuppel , Projektraum Berlin, 1997), with the change of perspective (a room furniture is turned by 90 °: I love Dich , Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Munich, 1983; ceiling stucco appears under the parquet floor: Der Raum des Vaters , Bonner Kunstverein , 1984), Paradoxien (a brick wall falls like a curtain: Rotwand: Diaphan , Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Munich, 1996) and surprises (disaster videos are hidden behind opening shutters, behind Schra door views of the starry sky: The cabinet , Hypo-Bank Magdeburg, 1994; unexpected rain falls from a cloud sculpture: Cumulus: Cambodunum , Theaterplatz Kempten, 2007).

Huber often combines individual works to create spatial passages that can be explored successively ( Das Spielzimmer , Bonner Kunstverein , 1984; Rote Sonnen , Kunstraum München , 1986). The most extensive of such works to date was created in 2001/2002 for solo exhibitions in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig and in the Kunstverein Hannover . Under the title 8.5 room flat. f. Artist, 49 years old (or 7.5 room apt .... / 8-room apt .... ) Huber brought numerous related sculptural, installation, graphic and film works into one over several cabinets extensive ensemble, which in its entirety was to be understood as the artist's aesthetic psychogram.

This work on his own biography runs through Huber's entire oeuvre. References to the artist's origins - such as mountains or upper-class interiors - are mixed with fictional elements (as in the often varied work Shining , in which Huber moves a model of the real parental home into a surreal, deserted ice desert). By making himself the protagonist and addressing his homeland, his childhood, but also what has been seen, read and remembered, he outlines his own social, geographical and intellectual horizon within which he moves (for example in the book objects, which are real and freely imagined Treat literary references indiscriminately and equally: The cabinet , 1978; Catastrophes and Rescue , Versicherungskammer Bayern, Munich, 2005). Just as Huber's apparently concretely localizable “landscapes” are not to be read as images of real physical conditions, but as symbols of a psychoanalytically reflected “soul landscape”, for him “home” is not a primarily geographical term, but as a cipher for every form of personal positioning Counter-model to global placelessness and self-alienation.

The maps that Huber has been designing since the late 1990s are paradigmatic for this attitude : collages of real and invented maps in which personal experiences, experiences, desires and impressions are reflected in a fictitious spatial order and allusive topographical designations. Semi-documentary systems of order, evidenced by the seemingly incorruptible accuracy of the map material, emerge, with which the artist measures his own existence and undertakes to define the catchment area of ​​his thoughts and actions. The attempt at an exhaustive worldview that is valid without contradictions, however, always remains a fragment, because the world that surrounds and defines the artist cannot be captured in a panoramic view, but has to be mapped from ever new perspectives, i.e. has to be revised. In 2015, Huber published all the maps he had made up to this point in his world atlas , an artist's book that was deliberately designed based on the Diercke world atlas .

Huber also pursued the principle of referring to historical and local facts and fictitiously thinking them further in numerous works that he realized as art-in-building projects on a municipal or private contract: In four films for the Leibniz data center (Garching near Munich), for example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz meets with Theodor W. Adorno , Stephan Huber and the Devil, among others , and negotiates mathematical and aesthetic questions ( Great Praise of the Binary System , 2006); the Frankfurt staircase in the Main Tower (Frankfurt am Main, 1999) and the donor mosaic in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts (2003) bring together personalities from different eras to create impossible group portraits; Finally, Huber's examination of the poetic work of Else Lasker-Schuler is testified by the monument to the writer in Wuppertal, also made using mosaic technology ( Meinwärts , 1989).

In recent years Huber's interest in theatrical scenarios and episodic narratives has led to the production of several puppet and marionette plays. In an emphatically burlesque manner, the figure of Punch and Judy serves as an unadulterated, naive contrast to current events and his sometimes artificially complicated intellectual discourses in which the Punch is fatefully entangled ( Love and Peace , 2008; Drei Punch Pieces for the Ruhr Area , 2010). In addition, there were lecture performances with video and choir accompaniment.

As a curator , Huber was in charge of the Evergreen art project of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2005 at the Federal Garden Show in Munich-Riem (together with Hermann Pitz and Florian Matzner ) as well as the artistic design of the Munich Petuelpark ( on an invisible street, at the height of your windows ... , 2000–2004), with works by Barbara Bloom , Bogomir Ecker , Rodney Graham , Hans van Houwelinen , Harald Klingelhöller , Raimund Kummer , Aribert von Ostrowski , Kiki Smith , Pia Stadtbäumer , Roman Signer and Dietmar Tanterl .

Awards

Works in public space

Exhibitions

Monographs

Exhibition catalogs, other publications

  • Stephan Huber, The Kingdom of God flies - the art association dances , exhib.-cat. Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster 1982, with text by Thomas Deecke
  • Stephan Huber, Lager im Kopf , 1983, Kretschmer & Grossmann Verlag, Darmstadt
  • Stephan Huber , exhib.-cat. Bonner Kunstverein, 1984, with texts by Margarethe Jochimsen, Helmut Friedel , Stephan Huber, Michael Schwarz , Thomas Deecke, Hermann Pitz
  • The Engadin Project , 1987, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, with an interview between Stephan Huber and Uwe M. Schneede
  • Stephan Huber , 1989, artist, Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Art, text by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen
  • Stephan Huber, Raimund Kummer , 1991, exhibition cat. Hamburger Kunsthalle, with texts by Monika Steinhausen, Uwe M. Schneede , Armin Second , Thomas Deecke, Margarethe Jochimsen, Helmut Friedel and others
  • Stephan Huber, north wall south cross , 1993, exhibition cat. From the Heydt Museum Wuppertal, with texts by Ludger Derenthal and Stephan Huber
  • Stephan Huber, Raimund Kummer, Central Station North , 1994, Hamburg cultural authority, with texts by Uwe M. Schneede , Achim Könneke, Ludger Derenthal
  • Stephan Huber, building site , 1994, exhibition cat. Kunsthalle Mannheim, with an interview between Jochen Kronjäger and Stephan Huber
  • Four texts on Stephan Huber , 2001, exhibition cat. Kunstverein Hannover, Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, Municipal Gallery in the Lenbachhaus Munich, four volumes in a slipcase
  • ... on an invisible street at the height of your window .... , 2006, catalog for the art project Petuelpark, Prestel Verlag, Munich / New York, with texts by Uwe M. Schneede and Stephan Huber
  • Mondays at Petula Park. 12 performative evenings in the Café Petuelpark , 2008, ed. by Stephan Huber and the Lenbachhaus Munich
  • Hans-Jürgen Hafner: Stephan Huber. Leibniz, Larifari and the Devil , 2008, Kunstforum 191
  • Evelyn Schels: In front of the mountains: The sculptor Stephan Huber , film documentation, first broadcast on November 21, 2010, Bavarian television

Web links

Commons : Stephan Huber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.stiftungbremerbildhauerpreis.de/preistraeger/stephan-huber-2006.html
  2. ↑ http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/kult/kulturfoerderung/preise/kunstpreise/221763/kunstpreis08.html
  3. ↑ Irene Netta, Ursula Keltz: 75 years of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich . Ed .: Helmut Friedel. Self-published by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-88645-157-7 , p. 215 .
  4. ↑ The measurement of the imagination in FAZ of April 30, 2014, page R6
personal data
SURNAME Huber, Stephan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sculptor and object artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Lindenberg in the Allgäu