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A woman stands on a narrow ledge. At her back are impossibly sheer, high walls. One step forward, the ledge falls off abruptly.

She does not shrink away from the edge, or cry out, or jump off. She does not spread her arms and fly away.

Her feet are flat on the ground, hands hung loosely down, weight spread equally to both legs. Body erect but relaxed. Lungs half-emptied of air. Eyes level. Mouth closed.

Stephan Balkenhol has created many characters such as the one he depicts in Female Corner Sculpture, 2000. Characters capable of action who do nothing, prepared to speak but with mouths shut, full of potential life yet waiting for a reason even to breathe. Most are male, costumed simply in open-necked white shirts and black trousers. They are characters who neither endure nor prevail, are neither oblivious nor agitated; they simply exist.

Since 1982, when he broke away from the minimalist method he had taken up in art school and began making figurative sculpture,¹ Balkenhol has returned again and again to variations on such characters. They appear in Three Men on a Sculpted Pedestal, 2000, this time with their backs to the precipice. Like most figures in the artist’s body of work, their eyes are fixed on an indistinct point, perhaps far beyond us, perhaps turned inward, deep behind the facades we mistake for their selves. They stand in triangle formation—stable figures in a stable composition—yet each is precariously alone, gazing through the space between the other two.

Balkenhol’s quick and rough technique, as akin to sketching as to sculpture, reveals the method, materials and marks of his process. He works very fast, making the smaller works in a few hours, the point being to keep the image fresh in its translation from mind to wood. The faceted surfaces of his sculpture have been compared to brushstrokes in a painting. Indeed, they bring to mind the “broken stroke” of Impressionism: the flurry of gestures meant, in painting, to capture ephemeral light effects, here used to enliven the figure by creating such effects.

Both figure and base (Balkenhol prefers the German “Sockel,” implying grounding rather than elevation) are usually carved together from a single block of wood; in the relief carvings the image remains embedded in the slab. One almost feels that if Balkenhol were to finalize these sculptures they might come to life: the subtle, first moment of a hand gesture or the crook of a leg give the sense that the figure is nearly capable of moving. Yet the artist stops early on, leaving an impression not so much of a figure emerging from its matrix as of a tree bearing an unlikely sport, or an image engulfed. Where Michelangelo’s figures are said to have been liberated from the block of marble, Balkenhol’s are forever weighted down, anchored to their origins.

The minimalist sculptors who were Balkenhol’s first influences made a theoretical point of eliminating the pedestal, de-estheticizing the objects they made. So when Balkenhol makes the base an integral part of the sculpture, he both nods in the minimalist direction (the sculpture lies directly on the floor) and subverts it. It is both sculpture and base, both a hunk of wood—still a part of nature—and a human presence.

One writer says that Balkenhol’s figures are “attractive specimens.”² Another sees them as “refugees, shunted from one place to another and belonging nowhere.”³ The first, Ingrid Schaffer, assures us that Balkenhol creates “the Gemütlich counterparts in sculpture to Alex Katz’s painted society of fashionable party-goers.” But Sarah Kent warns that they are “the long term unemployed, surplus to the requirements of an automated society; insane, turned out of long-stay hospitals to loiter on street corners; or people who have been, in some other way, disenfranchised or dispossessed.” “Balkenhol seems intent,” Kent tells us. “on conveying the sense of displacement and alienation that typifies our time.”

Of course, neither take is demonstrably right. These figures could as easily be dressing down (CEOs on a Saturday afternoon, perhaps) as dressed up (poor people going to church). And that is where the work generally leaves us: balanced lightly on a knife-edge between equally plausible truths.

Does “balance” imply an active choice, a straining to keep from falling? What is the word for a single, indivisible moment in the process of being? For that tiny increment at the center of a continuum between energy and torpidity?

In this moment of (let us call it) stasis, Balkenhol’s figures—and, metaphorically, we—are no longer distracted or filled up by activity, nor shut down. We are open to the world as it is, rather than as we wish it to be.

The relationship of Balkenhol’s sculptural work to photography—and particularly to the photographs of August Sander, whose dead-ahead portraits of people from all walks of 1920s German life look like Balkenhol models—has been remarked upon by several writers. Indeed, the artist professes a strong interest in photography, and in a 1994 interview drew a parallel between his sculpture and the snapshot. “It’s a little as though you found a private photo in the street,” he said. “You don’t know the person or persons in the picture and yet at the same time, it’s something very personal. My sculptures can represent a definite person or whoever, a ‘Mr. Everyman.”⁴(4)

Given this prior interest, it is hardly surprising that Balkenhol has now begun to use the photograph more directly in his work. Mouth and Eye I, both 2000, are silkscreen images, printed on large sheets of plywood, produced from original photographs the artist made of details of his sculpture. One thinks of the images Constantin Brancusi made of his own sculpture-lessons, in a sense, in looking at Brancusi sculpture. By focusing on intimate “human” (as opposed to more technical “sculptural”) details such as the mouth and eye, Balkenhol emphasizes the relationship of his work to life.

At the same time, he also uses these photographic pieces to allude to an art concern that shows up elsewhere in his work. Scale is an ongoing consideration. Balkenhol’s figures are generally not life-size, but either smaller or larger; a huge eye or mouth implies a monumental figure.

This exhibition, developed by the artist specifically as a group of works to travel together as a unified installation, concentrates primarily on human figures. Balkenhol has created many works in the past that reference the interrelationship between humans and animals (he has even created mythical beings with the physical attributes of both). In this case, however, the artist decided to include only one animal sculpture Giraffe (Pompeiian Red), 2000.

If scale is important in considering Balkenhol’s new photographic works, it is also a major element in the 8 1/2-foot-high Male Torso and Female Torso, both 2000. Balkenhol has produced sculptures in the past that are similar either in their classical subject or their large size, but they show up less frequently than the casually dressed figures and languid animals.

The nude is, of course, both an ancient subject and a problematic one for the socially engaged artist. The depiction of animals in art today is suspect, too (is it a sweetening agent?) . Balkenhol deflects criticism, however, by handling the nudes and animals in the same way he does other figures: they are all disinterested witnesses to the workings of an indifferent world.

1. Balkenhol studied at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, where his most influential teacher was the prominent minimalist Ulrich Rückriem. ↩︎
2. Ingrid Schaffner, “The Living Sound of Wood,” in Stephen Balkenhol (Paris: Editions Dis Voir), 78. ↩︎
3. Sarah Kent, “The Company of Stranger,” in Stephan Balkenhol: Sculptures 1988-1996 in the Saatchi Collection (London: Saatchi Gallery, 1996). 8. ↩︎
4. From an interview with Alexandra Midal quoted in Schaffner, op. cit., 60. ↩︎