Christian Lemmerz

Christian Lemmerz (born January 30, 1959) is a German-Danish sculptor and visual artist who attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, Italy, from 1978 to 1982 and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1983 to 1988. Despite classical sculpture training in Carrara, Lemmerz drew his main inspiration from the post-war process-oriented pop art, not least from his fellow countryman, Joseph Beuys.

In the early 1980s Lemmerz was part of the Danish artist collective Værkstedet Værst and the performance group Performancegruppen Værst. He conducted numerous performances there from 1985 to 1994, many of these alongside lifelong friend and artist Michael Kvium.

For his artistic achievements, Lemmerz was honoured with Thorvaldsen's Medal in 2009 and the Eckersberg Medal in 2008. In 2015 he received the New Carlsberg Foundation's Artist Grant. The viewer's visual and tactile senses are alerted, thus engaging them as an active participant.

Lemmerz' approach can be seen as a rejection of the formal idiom in favour of experimentation with material aesthetics, often evoking illness, death or philosophy. Confrontation with the view is important in all the art forms he employs whether sculpture, installation or photography. In parallel, he has increasingly moved into performance, film and video.

The artist works with white Carrara marble. He re-actualizes classical Greek art with the statue, Adam-Kadmon, and in the light of an art historical timeline that runs through classical, baroque, neo-classical and French salon art, he elaborates on the incessantly recurring themes of violence, terror and death while supplying this entire register of heavy and somber issues with erotic, absurdist and ironic twists.

Current political and ethical questions become endowed with a clearer voice through the works, which always, in terms of their form and content, constitute a transformation from recognizability to the more veiled or unknown, inasmuch as Lemmerz is working rhizomatically, where the assertion sometimes assumes a classically distinct form and sometimes manifests itself with a gestural formlessness. His whole pluralistic oeuvre is bound together, at the same time, by the fragment – as an open and processual figure.

Seminal works For the exhibition Scene at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum in 1994, Lemmerz worked with blood-smeared surfaces and decomposing pigs' carcasses in glass-walled, steel-framed vitrines inspired by traditional still lifes where inanimate objects are often used as existential symbols. The exhibition actualized the universal theme of death and the transitory through sculptures that were contemporary in their form and presentation. The installation ensnared the audiences into a limbo of intrigue and disgust, making it close to impossible to look away. The audience might have wondered if the pigs were brutally killed for the exhibition or if they died a natural death, much like they would with the artwork Away from the Flock from 1994 by British artist Damien Hirst. The banality of the pigs and their known similarity to humans give the work its emotion. With Scene, Lemmerz worked within a psychological borderline area, where the very notion of sculpture had been distended to its most extreme implications. 2009 Awarded the Thorvaldsen Medal. 2010 Lifetime achievement award from Statens Kunstfond

Collections Statens Museum for Kunst, Nationalmuseet, ARoS Museum of Modern Art, SAXO Collection, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, HEART, Trapholt, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Horsens Kunstmuseum, Kanstrupgårdsamlingen, KØS Museum for Offentlig Kunst, The Saatchi Collection London, Stavanger Kunstmuseum.

Art market and fair Lemmerz is represented by Copenhagen-based Hans Alf Gallery, by Galleri Franz Pedersen in Horsens, Galleri Brandstrup in Oslo, Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong and Faurschou Foundation New York. He has exhibited his work at international art fairs such as ENTER Art Fair, Art Cologne and FIAC.