LONDON, Hauser & Wirth, Hans Josephsohn exhibition, May 28 - July 27, 2008

At Hauser & Wirth London, Josephsohn’s first exhibition in the UK, a selection of sculptures will be on display on three floors of the gallery. Dating from the 1950s to the present day, these allow the viewer to witness the gradual development of the artist’s practice. Slender, near-symmetrical figures that recall Egyptian stele made at the start of Josephsohn’s career will be shown alongside the extraordinary half-figures that he has been working on since the 1980s. The latter are vast, boulder-like forms in which physiognomic detail has become bleary and indeterminate. Solid yet amorphous, they seem suffused with buried feeling; to be on the verge of becoming, yet liable at any moment to revert back to inchoate matter. In the words of the art historian Gerhard Mack, his 'work proposes an art of relations that starts to question its validity as soon as it acquires its form.' It is an art that is riven with paradox, simultaneously summary and expressive, roughed-in and eloquent, caught between the momentary and the continual.

Josephsohn was born in 1920 to a prosperous Jewish family in Königsberg (Kaliningrad), then East Prussia. He travelled to Florence in 1938 to study sculpture then emigrated to Switzerland in the wake of fascist laws. He has lived and worked in Zürich ever since. There are two permanent installations of his work open to the public: Kesselhaus Josephsohn, an exhibition space and foundry outside St. Gallen, Switzerland; and La Congiunta, a small museum in the Southern Swiss Alps designed by the architect Peter Märkli, to whom the artist has been a longstanding key influence. Last year Ugo Rondinone curated a room around Josephsohn’s work as part of his 'The Third Mind' exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and major exhibitions of Josephsohn’s work include retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002) and the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art (7 February – 6 April 2008).