ArtMetal / Hephaistos

A Physician and the Love of Steel

 

page 4

The leaf of the east Asian ginko biloba. For the Old Germans it was the Great Woldtree Yggdrasil, for the modern Germans the oak. For Clausssen (as for Goethe before him) it's the ginko tree. Like the myths of old, the ginko has has survived the ages almost unchanged. A ginko tree survived even the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, perhaps man's most violent assault on nature. The two distinct forms of its leaves intrigue even the scholars. For Claussen, the leaves symbolize the contradictions and contrasts without which the world could hardly exist as well as the division of the personality of the artist between art and technology. Claussen is concentrating here on the forms of the Bauhaus (circle, triangle, rectangle), the reduction to bare essentials in contrast to masks and grotesques that are often elaborated in great detail. One of his "leaf monuments" has stood since last fall in the famous Charité in Berlin.

 

 

But he errs who thinks that the 56 year old artist is resting on his laurels. He's forever pushing something further, in science or in art. For some time now he's been experimenting with pictures using the spray technique. [? airbrush? - tr.] Beings from the Universe, in forms generated with specially prepared patterns, Claussen's vision proceeds...

 

 

last refreshed Sat, Oct 4, 1997

© copyright 1997 all rights reserved ArtMetal / HEPHAISTOS Internationale Zeitschrift für Metallgestalter