Joseph Beuys
Facts
- Biography
- *1921 in Krefeld, Germany
† 1986 in Düsseldorf, Germany - Worked with
- Sculpture, drawing, prints, installations and performance
Joseph Beuys understood art as the "realisation of human freedom". Natural materials like felt, fat, wax, honey and copper were his materials of choice, a symbolic spiritual vocabulary for energy, creativity and potential. After a crisis in the mid-1950s, Joseph Beuys developed an "expanded concept of art". For him, the work of art is "social sculpture".
In the drawings from the 1950s, processes of growth constitute a central theme. When Beuys later expanded his oeuvre, he applied his desire to explore transformation to ossified structures and creative, pulsating human-oriented forms.
