Erwin Wortelkamp – Durchdringungen

In the organizer's words:

Erwin Wortelkamp (born 1938 in Hamm/Sieg) is intensively involved with nature, especially in the sculpture park he designed, "Im Tal" and in Acquaviva (IT), which is echoed in his sculptural and graphic work. In close dialog with nature, he also developed references to the human form. In 1976, he called his first sculpture in the newly created landscape park "Perhaps a tree": it marked the beginning of an ongoing preoccupation with the inner core of the tree, its massive power and vulnerability. He sees it as his own "alter ego".

Erwin Wortelkamp is internationally known primarily as a sculptor. However, his graphic oeuvre of more than 4,000 sheets, which he has created over the course of more than six decades, has received less attention to date. It ranges from sketches for projects and actions to architectural designs and independent free works. From 1986 at the latest, at the same time as he moved to Italy for the second time, color became a key element in his work. In serial cycles, Wortelkamp works on form and content, sometimes linking art historical references with existential aspects. Here, artistic processes develop as if in an ongoing dialog. He experiments with the materiality of the different papers, carves, cuts into them, opens up the sheet surface, integrates natural materials and covers the sheet ground with saturated color tones. Last but not least, Wortelkamp uses the possibilities of woodcut and embossing.

For Erwin Wortelkamp, "penetrations" are therefore not only visible, formal acts of sculptural shaping, but are always also meant physically and mentally. Every form, every color, every
dialogical principle - be it in the sculpture, on the page or in the written text - becomes an existential question in his work. The aim of the current presentation is to devote himself intensively to this extensive body of work for the first time and to explore the question of interpenetration.