Josephsohn as seen by Albert Oehlen Review of the Swiss sculptor's retrospective in Paris . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Patricia L Lewy
Two steep stairways lead up to the special exhibition space at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Confronted first by a wall of titles and texts, one never really knows what to expect after that sharp right turn toward the galleries. On this occasion, it was a slow reveal: I approached a white-walled space, empty but for two Egyptian ushabti-like figurines—or were they perhaps modeled after Greek korai?—one plaster, one cast brass, each on a white plinth. Still unseeing, my attention was caught by a wall relief, Untitled (1948–49)—a chair? A person? Turns out it was both. I progressed through the show, awed by the human figure in elemental poses—standing, sitting, reclining, half-figures, full figures, monumental and small scale, heads of gigantic proportions looming over compressed torsos—all still. Some figures are in their original plaster states, others were later cast in brass. In both cases, their worked surfaces veil intelligible expression, their surfaces a kind of reticulated disorder, relentless and absolute. I was dumbstruck.
And for good reason. Hans Josephsohn’s (1920–2012) art practice was hermetic, uncompromising, and obsessive, undertaken alone, principally in and around Zurich. Relatively unknown despite solo exhibitions in Switzerland since the 1950s, this artist’s remarkable body of work was brought to international attention only at the start of the aughts. The current exhibition in Paris is his first one-man show in France, though in 2007 a group show here—The Third Mind, curated by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone at the Palais de Tokyo—included half a dozen of his reclining figures. Unsurprisingly but no less remarkably, it is another contemporary artist, Albert Oehlen, who curated this first French one-person exhibition. As much as Oehlen’s commitment to Josephsohn’s work, his celebrity has made this exhibition possible.
Josephsohn’s concerns began and ended with the figure. Working in parallel with modernism’s expansion into hybridity and fragmentation, his neoclassical throughline lays well outside the aesthetic expressions of his time. His figures are based almost exclusively on three life partners, their forms worked out compulsively, nearly as an aesthetic sexual act—an erotic responsiveness to plaster, an impregnation, a pushing, an entering, a spreading of material by hand that catalyzed outward growth from within. Standing in the same space with these mottled surfaces—primarily brass, cast from plaster—one senses they were shaped incrementally, in bits, through repetitive compressions of thumb and forefinger, then pressed into a surface. Josephsohn leaves his impress everywhere, a powerfully indexical record of his process. As he avers in Josephsohn—Stein des Anstosses (Josephsohn—Stumbling Block) (1977), a film by Jürg Hassler, “I stop when it corresponds to my vision and my feeling.” He further suggests that a film of him at work can suggest nothing close to the essence of his being at work. It is like filming sex, he says; the “deep meaning”—the love—behind the act is lost. “And while I’m doing this … I’m trying to show you my work. And at the same time, I realize, and I tell myself that it’s not possible.”
