norbert kricke

30th of November 1922 - 28th of June 1984

Art is able to serve as a link between the past, the present, and the future. Anyway it needs to be an essential precondition to perceive the artist’s work as very high quality performance by several successive generations with its own, often very different, sense of aesthetics and visual values. If those predecessors and contemporaries will still respect, admire, and even love it, the art is on a way to become an artistic milestone. However, only a small number of masters manage to achieve this universal timelessness, exceptional quality, and intelligibility…

Norbert Kricke undoubtedly belongs among the artists who have achieved this artistic position. With his work, he followed up the avant-garde and modernist movements of pre-war Europe (the Russian avant-garde, German Expressionism, Bauhaus, De Stijl). He developed his art visions in dialogue with public space and architecture, perfectly adapting his ideas to the needs of materiality, dimensions, and abstracted visuality processed for urban planning needs. Within their simple, essential  concept, his sculptures carry the attributes of movement, deep emotionality, fragility, order, and predefined structure.

The first non-figurative sculptures date back to the early 1950s. Simple wire objects are characterized by structures formed from contour lines, smoothly bent in horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions. The centre of the sculpture remains empty, which is why they can be described as spatial drawings. Many of these objects were painted, most commonly in white, blue, yellow, or red. This first period of abstract works is highly simplified and geometrized.

From 1955 onward, these spatial drawings also appeared in amorphous variations, closer to natural visual forms, at times evoking vegetation or the flows of wind and water.

In the same period, Kricke developed the concept of structurally more complexed sculptures made from welded stainless-steel bars. Works look dynamic with organic vitality, the elements no longer trace mentioned silhouette line, segments extend toward the sculpture’s core while simultaneously reaching outward into the surrounding space. Though dynamic in appearance, these sculptures are not kinetic—all the parts are firmly connected. The sculpture gains volume, influenced by invisible forces or energies. Yet it is still possible to observe the intentional structuring of the whole sculpture, where order and natural forces are in balance.

At the beginning of the 1960s structure slowly transforms to chaos. Surprisingly, this chaos is not confusing, resembles formations such as organelles and capillaries and seems to be very essential and true. Order and regularity are absent, objects embody the unique moment of birth. This moment is intensely emotional and fragile, yet simultaneously powerful and inevitable…

In the mid-1970s, Norbert Kricke returned to simplicity , building upon the sculptures of the 1950s. Most of his spatial artifacts are defined by a horizontal curved line. Throughout all periods of his sculptural work, series of drawings accompanied his process, mapping the artist’s thoughts and often preceding the sculptural creations.

The exhibition of Norbert Kricke at Závodný Gallery was curated by Hans-Peter Riese, who arranged the works to reflect the development of the artist’s career, offering the Czech audience a complete and cohesive presentation of his work. This is the first time the collection has been presented in the Czech Republic. The exhibition was made possible through the generous patronage of Sabine Kricke–Güse and her family, without whose support it could not have been realized.