Joahim Berthold, Modernist Bronze Sculpture of a Lounging Couple, ca. 1960

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About object
Signed and numbered in back.
Signed: J. Beithold.
Limited Edition: 4/9

Joachim Berthold (German, 1917 – 1990)
Joachim … Read more About object
Signed and numbered in back.
Signed: J. Beithold.
Limited Edition: 4/9

Joachim Berthold (German, 1917 – 1990)
Joachim Berthold, born 1917 in Eisenach, lived and worked until his death in 1990 in Oberaudorf am Inn. In 1936 he began his training at the renow¬ ned Werkschule in Cologne. There he met his artist colleague and later wife Gisela Berthold¬Sames and he continued his studies until 1941 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 1945 he worked as a freelance sculptor. This was followed by hard artist years in which the execution of any commissioned work to secure a livelihood left little time for free work. Gradually, the situation improved until, from the 1960s, it gained interna¬tional renown through more and more numerous and important exhibitions at home and abroad, large orders from industry and cities as well as mu¬seum acquisitions.

Berthold's appearance was striking. This corresponds to his figurative, mainly in bronze realized small to larger than life-sized sculptures. The to¬pic of his work was the man. He was not concerned with the representation of individual, external manifestations. His sculptures are reduced to the essentials, re¬ main in their economical movements, wi¬thout facial expressions, anonymous and timeless. The essence of man and his development between becoming and decay were his concerns.

Through the mental processing of Greek me¬taphors, he concentrated on the depiction of the human forms involved in a matter or in their own body form and dissolving out of it, as well as cast their own shadow. Berthold's typical formal idiom lives from the antago¬nism of convex and concave, perfectly smoo¬thed and rough, sometimes broken surfaces, exposing the underlying innermost amor¬phous layers. See less