The new solo exhibition by Joachim Bandau at Galerie Maubert, titled Lines of Flight, brings together works related to architecture and its constraints—particularly through the figure of the bunker, a central motif in his work, presented in dialogue with the analyses of Paul Virilio (Penser par l’expérience photographique – Bunker Archéologie Paul Virilio, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Oct. 2024 – March 2025).

          The title, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari [1], evokes both a “retreat” (a war strategy) and the possibility of a “perspective” (not only in drawing): a creative gesture of rupture, where form frees itself from constraint. Echoing Virilio’s reflections addressed to Bandau on the shift in his practice “from the immobile to the mobile,” the sculptor gradually stopped opposing alienation and resilience. Rather, the lines, inspired by those of the bunkers, no longer appear as obstacles but as escape trajectories—poetic fissures in an enclosure that is only apparent.

          In the 1960s and 1970s, Joachim Bandau examined the ambivalence of technological progress through sculptures he called “fetishes of fear”: assemblies of steel and resin evoking monstrous, hybrid forms, at once biomorphic and mechanical. These entities—legless, mounted on wheels, equipped with tubes—embody the deformation of a human figure increasingly reliant on technology, and subject to movements or flows beyond its control.

          The year 1976 marked a major turning point. Just as he completed his last ambulatory figures in a collaboration with Daimler-Benz [2], Bandau discovered Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, published the previous year to accompany the eponymous exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. The book proved a catalyst. The fascist architecture of Second World War fortifications, with its brutal formalism, reactivated childhood memories of war, where shelters turned into traps; the Allied bombings of Cologne (1942), where six-year-old Joachim struggled to escape the rubble of his destroyed family home; the air raid on Hagen (1945), during which he took refuge in a forest rather than the town’s bunker, which was ultimately destroyed, killing all 450 people inside; and, in the final days of the war, a strafing attack by fighter planes, which he escaped along with friends while playing in a field turned into an impromptu playground.

          In a letter to Virilio, he wrote: “At the beginning of 1976, in Cologne, I bought your catalogue Bunker Archaeology at Walther König’s art bookshop and was fascinated by the photos of bunkers I had known so well in my childhood. After 35 years, and looking at your photos of bunkers, I felt the connection between the resemblance of these enormous concrete monsters and my fictional monsters in iron and polyester. […] It’s a strange and at the same time frightening experience to feel fascination for something that one still fears deeply and profoundly hates.”

          What also interests Bandau in the architecture of the bunker is its formal radicality—its apparent neutrality concealing a dark reality: “Fascist architecture, as concrete sculpture, formally radical, functional, worked out convincingly and uncompromisingly in its form. And precisely because of this, it appears even more threatening, pathetic—a total unity of form and power.” In 1976, as part of an art competition on German air weaponry, Bandau began producing a group of objects that expressed a critical stance toward the military. He adopted the bunker form for its apparent neutrality, while subtly referencing the constructions of Nazi architecture as a way to express a position of deep refusal.

          From that point, he temporarily gave up sculpture to focus entirely on drawing. Between 1976 and 1978, he produced a series of large-scale drawings—100 x 175 cm, the size of his drawing table—inspired by Virilio’s photographs of the Atlantic Wall. Stained with tea or coffee, the early drawings—spontaneous and disorderly—refer directly to the book: the page numbers from which the motifs are taken appear in the compositions, which have no fixed orientation and are often drawn on both sides of the paper.»

          Bandau quickly moved beyond these source images to explore new typologies of extreme architecture linked to confinement: fictional bunkers, concentration camps, endless minefields, gas chambers, death rooms… He drew a striking parallel with the contemporary postwar German housing estates around him, whose form and organization bore disturbing similarities to Nazi-era incarceration sites.

          A third period emerged, centering on more sculptural forms within the drawings, that synthesize his earlier explorations. Bandau’s return to sculpture began in 1978, when he transferred architectural forms to floor level, inviting a top-down perspective and encouraging viewers to move around the piece in order to discover—or imagine—its internal structures. First in lead, then in steel, these massive, dense sculptures extend the obsessions of his drawings. The purified forms—planes and edges—condense content without fixing it into narrative. The bunker remains a central motif, but becomes a basis for exploring dualities: fullness and emptiness, protection and imprisonment, withdrawal and expansion.

          This quest for freedom of movement within constrained spaces finds a new expression from 1983 onward in a new typology of works. Watercolour, made with pigment and applied in varying liquidity with large Japanese brushes, allows Bandau to create flat fields of colour, but also lines formed by pigment migration at the edges. Seen up close, the Black Watercolors are not perfectly rectilinear, but feature curved corners and hand-drawn lines that subtly meander. “The viewer decodes the work in reverse,” the artist explains, referring to the composition of these paintings as a buildup of multiple individual layers (sometimes more than forty). “Each new surface is a response to the one before it, arranged intuitively in a temporal sequence. I sometimes spend months, years on a single work.”

          The superimposition of light grey watercolour layers produces volume through modeling and introduces erratic motion via the vibration of graphic forms. It is the work of a sculptor: a mass in the making. In their radical autonomy, these sheets—both concentrated and meditative, and arguably Bandau’s most personal work [3]—achieve a transparent, liquid weightlessness that opens a window onto the sculptor’s desire to master form. 

          Like his sculptures, the Black Watercolors convey simultaneous impressions of contraction and expansion. Their psychological and existential dimensions express positions of withdrawal and openness to the world. They remind us that “lines of flight” are forces that break from rigid established orders, opening toward unexplored worlds—other ways of thinking, living, and sensing. A force of creation: rhizomatic, in motion, transformative.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980 (Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2).

[2] Former name of the Mercedes-Benz group from 1926 to 1998.

[3] Beat Wismer, « Giving Shape to Content. The Dialectic of Form and Content in Joachim Bandau’s Work », in Joachim Bandau: Skulpturen 1976-1990, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 1990