JOACHIM BANDAU

Born in Cologne in 1936, Joachim Bandau has been making sculptures, drawings, and watercolors since the late 1960s which are at once close to figuration and abstraction, geometric and biomorphic forms, emotion and rationality. From 1967 to 1974, he created imposing polyester structures, with sinuous and biomorphic shapes that evoke medical equipment or mechanical organs, confronting scientific advances and the atrocities of World War II. One of Bandau’s main themes emerges: contrasting tension between confinement and spatial deployment. After his exhibition Documenta 6 in 1977 and the influence of Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology, Bandau radicalizes his sculpture, pushing it towards abstraction, producing drawings and sculptures of bunkers. His work is often associated with Minimalism, yet it is different: the human body is at the very heart of Bandau’s pieces with regards to both physical and mental considerations. By reconciling rational thought with feelings, Joachim Bandau is the creator of emotional geometry. The Black Watercolour, which he has been producing since the 1990s, are superimposed light-gray layers of hand-applied watercolors. Like his sculptures, they convey simultaneous sensations of contraction and extension, with both psychological and existential significance, reflecting positions of withdrawal and openness to the world.

He belongs to an important group of German artists, together with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Imi Knoebel, who came out of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1961. In 1966, he is among the founders of the group of artists K66. In 1977, he is exhibited at Documenta 6 in Kassel and in 1986 he receives the Will Grohmann Award from the Berlin Academy of Arts. Joachim Bandau has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at the Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Neues Museum (Nuremberg), M HKA (Antwerp), SculptureCenter (New York), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Städtische Kunsthalle (Mannheim), Fine Art Museum (Budapest), De Young Museum (San Francisco), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels). In 2021, he presented Die Nichtschönen. Werke 1967–1974, a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel (curator Elena Filipovic).