Axel Anklam – Format

Skulptur, Relief /sculpture, relief

24. Juni – 26. August 2017/June 24 – August 26, 2017

Vernissage: Freitag, 23. Juni 2017, 19-21 Uhr/Opening: Friday, June 23 2017, 7-9pm

Axel Anklam, Schneeland (Detail), 2017, Diptychon, Edelstahl titanbeschichtet/stainless steel, titanium-coated, 113 x 220 x 10 cm

For the first time, we present the new titanium-coated, stainless steel reliefs by the sculptor Axel Anklam in a solo show in Berlin. These large-format reliefs are a consistent development of his work in a series of sculptures, which since 2008 have evolved from the artist’s walks observing nature. Phenomena such as glaciers and other mountain formations as well as landscapes, have materialised into bodies floating in space through the sculptor’s work with fibreglass, GKF, stainless steel gauze and epoxy resin.
In March of this year, Axel Anklam received the “Kunstpreis Berlin 2017” from the Academy of Arts in the “Fine Arts” section for his unique sculptures, in which he combines the perfection of craftsmanship in balancing mass and weight with his own note of musicality and poetry.
In his new reliefs, Axel Anklam pushes the interplay of light, weightlessness and mass, which characterise his sculptures, into the forefront: he completely renounces the existing stainless steel line, which gave his abstract landscapes their stamp and character. What remains is the stretched out surface of the landscape, a concentrate, in the form of titanium-coated stainless steel: his golden reliefs associate magically with energy fields, gleaming sunlight: his black reliefs open up the space with width and depth while at the same time the reflecting surface brings the the viewer back to themself. These reliefs are combined with sculptures, for example “Melancholia”, in which Anklam covers the carcass of stainless steel with a carbon fibre. Dynamism and tranquility are combined here in a simultaneously exciting and harmonious body, associated with flight of fancy and meditation.
Axel Anklam born in Wriezen (Brandenburg); 1987-1990 apprenticeship as artist blacksmith, 1993 master craftsman; studied sculpture at HfKD Burg Giebichenstein Halle, Germany; 2002-2006 studied sculpture at Universität der Künste, Berlin, 2010 Meisterschüler bei/with Tony Cragg; visiting professor für Bildhauerei, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Germany; 2004 „Neue Berolina“, Hausvogteiplatz, Berlin; 2014 First Prize in the Percent-for-Art Competition for the new building of the Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung [Federal Ministry of Education and Research] in Berlin, in cooperation with Thomas Henninger und Ulrike Gravert („Eunomia macrocosmica ∑3“); 2017 „Kunstpreis Berlin“ (section Fine Arts) of the Akademie der Künste.

biography by request