Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of work by distinguished German sculptor, Lun Tuchnowski (1946 - 2018). The exhibition will run from 10th February – 26th March 2022 and will be an overview of works spanning 40 years. It will be Tuchnowski’s third exhibition at the gallery and the first since his death in 2018. The works were chosen from the extensive Lun Tuchnowski exhibition at Museum Würth, Kunzelsau, Germany, in 2021-22.
Taking inspiration from architecture, design, literature, poetry and mechanics, Tuchnowski’s eclectic sculptures are masterful explorations of form. Largely influenced by his teacher and mentor, Danish sculptor Robert Jacobson, Tuchnowski was a ‘hands on’ sculptor with an appreciation for mechanical design (classic cars and motorbikes) as much as the Cubist-inspired early twentieth-century welded sculptures of Picasso and Gonzalez. Predominantly abstract, punctuated with moments of figuration, his works stimulate the imagination. Works from the 1980’s and 1990’s interact with the surrounding architecture; jutting from or leaning against the wall or sprawling across the floor. Whilst later works play with the human form with equal elements of wit and sculptural expertise.
Influences are as myriad and intriguing as the sculptures themselves. The ‘Roithamer’ works (2000-2002) take as their point of departure a description in the 1975 novel ‘Correction’ by Thomas Bernhard, in which the main character, a philosopher and architect named Roithamer, designs and builds a cone shaped house for his sister. Tuchnowski made the interior and the exterior of the cone the subject of many sculptural variations. Meanwhile, the ‘Head’series from 2005-2009 are made from a mould of the artist’s skull with added sculptural elements representing his state of mind. They are, as Tuchnowski put it, “to some extent self-portraits: this is what is in my own head at the moment I make it.” Following the ‘Head’ series, Tuchnowski focused on a series of sculptures based on Chinese Pi discs: jade discs with a circular hole in the centre traditionally placed ceremonially on the body accompanying the dead into the afterworld. This interpenetration of two different areas of space had long fascinated Tuchnowski. The form is modified in Tuchnowski’s sculptures; sliced, undulating and interlocking, using both bronze and fibreglass to make contemporary sculptures.
Suggestions of the body appear in ‘Constructive Lips’ (2011) and ‘Hanging Tongues’ (2013), yet they remain abstract metal forms (as opposed to hyperrealistic wall sculptures of enlarged human lip forms he was also making at this time). The body becomes more explicit in the later ‘Bub’ works; surreal sculptural chairs that incorporate both human and animal elements. As Ian Barker states in the catalogue essay, they are “reminiscent of Picasso’s early twentieth century Harlequin paintings and his vigorous etching Minotauromachy of 1935 containing a minotaur - but with Lun’s sculptures more than a little humour attached.” A number of the ‘Bub’ chairs were completed after Tuchnowski’s death from cancer in 2018.
