Joseph Beuys

Life

*1921 in Krefeld, Germany; †1986 in Düsseldorf, Germany

Lived in Düsseldorf, worked with sculpture, drawing, prints, installations and performance

About the Work

Joseph Beuys understood art as the "realisation of human freedom". Natural materials like felt, fat, wax, honey and copper were his materials of choice, a symbolic spiritual vocabulary for energy, creativity and potential. After a crisis in the mid-1950s, Joseph Beuys developed an "expanded concept of art". For him, the work of art is "social sculpture".

In the drawings from the 1950s, processes of growth constitute a central theme. When Beuys later expanded his oeuvre, he applied his desire to explore transformation to ossified structures and creative, pulsating human-oriented forms.