Description
Exhibitions:
Numerous solo exhibitions.
1964 – Group exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Paris
German Sculpture, Dokumenta III, Kassel
2000 – The Georg Museum in Berlin devoted an exhibition to him, presenting 35 of his sculptures.
Commentary:
Gerson Fehrenbach lived and worked in Berlin throughout his life. He died in 2004. He created more than a dozen sculptures for public monuments and gardens in Germany. Many of his works are also held in private and public collections. He participated in numerous solo exhibitions and several group exhibitions, notably in 1964 in Paris at the Musée Rodin exhibition German Sculpture and at Dokumenta III in Kassel.
In 2000, the Georg Museum in Berlin dedicated an exhibition to him featuring 35 of his sculptures.
“After studying under Karl Hartung, Gerson Fehrenbach spent a year in Florence, then another year in Istanbul where he taught. Fehrenbach’s works stand at the boundary between the figurative and the immaterial, drawn at times toward one pole and at times toward the other. They are always composed according to the tectonic principle — that is, in Fehrenbach’s particular case, according to both natural and human laws: organic–constructive, unconscious–conscious.
They unite two antithetical principles into a singular stylistic unity made of art and nature, something Heinz Ohff describes very clearly in the preface to one of Fehrenbach’s exhibition catalogues:
‘From Hartung and Maillol, he borrowed the conception — in reality, a task consisting not in copying nature, but in interpreting it, allowing one’s own work to become absorbed into it, just as trees merge into the forest.’”
— Preface by Lucie Schauer, Eleven Sculptors from Berlin, Goethe Institut, 1984
Biography:
Gerson Fehrenbach was born on February 18, 1932, in Villingen, in Germany’s Black Forest region.
In 1946, he began an apprenticeship in wood sculpture.
In 1951, he trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bondorf / Black Forest under Walter Shelenz.
In 1954, he received a scholarship from the Freiburg im Breisgau Arts Society and also undertook a study stay in Paris.
From 1954 to 1960, he studied sculpture at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. He was awarded scholarships from the Cultural Circle of the Federation of German Industry and from the German National Academic Foundation.
In 1959, he became a student of the sculptor Karl Hartung at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. He participated in the first European Sculptors’ Symposium in Austria and received the Grand Salon Art Prize in Berlin.
In 1962, he received the Villa Romana Prize and stayed in Florence.
From 1963 to 1975, he served as assistant to Professor Erich F. Reuter in the Department of Plastic Composition at the Technical University of Berlin.
In 1967, he became a member of the German Artists’ Association.
In 1968, he was invited as a guest lecturer at the Technical University of Istanbul, Turkey.
From 1978 to 1979, he was a lecturer in Plastic Composition at the Technical University of Berlin.
From 1985 to 1990, he collaborated with the architect Bodo Fleischer on the new theater project in Pforzheim.
Bibliography:
Werkstatt Gespräche Gerson Fehrenbach, ein Bildhauerleben, Edition Bernd L. Richter, distributed by Artcolor-Verlag, Berlin, 1992.
Reproduced in the catalogue raisonné: Herausgegeben von der Stiftung für Bildhauerei, Gerson Fehrenbach – Skulptur und Zeichnung, Berlin, 2000, no. 121, p. 65.