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Exhibition

ROTRAUT Klein-Moquay
ROTRAUT Klein-Moquay
ROTRAUT Klein-Moquay
Dragon, 2006
BRONZE, VARNISHED IN RED
ahlers collection
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017
17. March 2007 - 17. June 2007

ROTRAUT Klein-Moquay

PICTURES AND SCULPTURES

The artist’s choice to go by her first name could not be more significant. For Rotraut, this choice is an act of liberation. She intentionally uses it to draw attention to herself as an individual and detaches herself as an artist from her family identity, whose influence on her is profound. She wanted to avoid at all costs a situation in which she would have her family name to thank for interest in her art. Rotraut was born Rotraut Uecker, the sister of the Düsseldorf artist whom we know as the master creator of nail objects. And in her first marriage she was Madame Klein, wife of the French artist who as a young man signed his name into the sky, named a colour after himself and became famous all over the world for his monochrome blue images. 

When Rotraut met Yves Klein in 1957 at the age of nineteen, she was already living in an artistic cosmos of her own, predominantly shaped by her personal experiences and adventures. Her childhood in the countryside in Mecklenburg played an important role. The impressions of Nature, constantly changing and becoming new, the rural rituals of arable farming from her father, but also the drawing and painting which she undertook together with her older brother Günther, stayed with her. When her brother went to study in Düsseldorf, she followed him and there became a self-taught artist. Rotraut saw Yves Klein’s works for the first time in the Schmela gallery. She was profoundly marked by them. She got to know the artist shortly after, when she worked in Nice at the house of Arman, a close friend of Klein’s, as an au pair.  

That was the period during which Rotraut produced her Galaxies. These were works which fell somewhere in between painting and sculpture. The artist drips a mixture of flour, water and lime (she later used the more durable plaster cast) onto a plywood frame covered with canvas. As soon as the relief-life image was dry, she painted it over with a black topography of hills and valleys. After letting this dry, she lightly sanded the peaks of the raised parts, so that a fascinating picture of the night sky emerges before the eyes of the viewer. In Rotraut’s works the desire to experiment meets the desire to enact a sign, which is characteristic of the art of the 1950s. The artist creates images which are abstract in their informal structures and objective in their precise evocations. 

The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation exhibition focuses on Rotraut’s early works from the 1950s and 60s and presents them together with large, impressive sculptures from the artist’s late period. This is a logical combination, because the sculpture modules were created in a similar way as the early Galaxies. In their genesis too, they start off as an informal sign. Then the computer simulation decides whether the found form displays a shift into a larger format. And like the Galaxies, the sculptures too are splendid hybrids, which wander back and forth between the poles of abstraction and figuration. 

Although the materials of Rotraut’s sculptures are varied – marble and iron, aluminium and bronze, wood and plastic – their phenomenology is unified. In their figure-accentuating outline and in their radiant atmosphere, line and colour are very effectively linked. The vertical gesture is reminiscent in all of its abstractedness of a collection of uniquely fable-like quality – a population, the movement and dynamism of which communicate at once the life force and the confidence of an artist who still maintains that art and life belong together, and for whom every artwork is a kind of declaration of love for life and for its creative and positive powers.

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