Opening Reception: Wednesday May 13, 5-8 PM
Extended Hours: Thursday May 14, 6-8 PM
Skarstedt is proud to present Hans Josephsohn: Early Sculpture (1947-56), which brings together sculptures and wall reliefs from the immediate post-war period. Organized in collaboration with the Hans Josephsohn Estate, this is the first exhibition in 70 years to focus exclusively on this early period of Josephsohn’s career and marks the gallery’s second solo exhibition devoted to the work of the Swiss sculptor, following upon the acclaimed retrospective curated by Albert Oehlen at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2024-25.
Born to a Jewish family in East Prussia in 1920, Josephsohn fled Nazi Germany in 1938, very briefly settling in Florence before being forced to relocate once again following the implementation of Mussolini’s antisemitic Racial Laws. While both of his parents lost their lives in the Holocaust, Josephsohn finally found refuge in Switzerland where he would spend the rest of his life in the solitude of his studio. Yet despite his family’s personal experience of racial persecution, Josephsohn himself often resisted attempts to interpret his practice through the lens of historical violence. Although Josephsohn’s work does not offer an explicit commentary on the horrors of the 20th Century, these solitary, sarcophagus-shaped figures, executed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, nonetheless seem to stand in the shadow of an immeasurable and unspeakable loss, without devolving into a facile expression of grief.
As a political exile from his homeland, Josephsohn retreated into his studio, where he devoted himself, obsessively and unwaveringly, to the human figure; as he said, “sculpture became my home country. Sculptors across history were my true relatives.” Spurning the contemporary art world and its boundless craving for novelty, Josephsohn committed himself to an ancient artistic practice, as he studied Romanesque frescoes, Assyrian and Etruscan sculpture, and other elemental visions of the human figure. Modeled in plaster and cast in brass, Josephsohn’s sculptures from the late 1940s and early 1950s simplify the human form into angular, geometric figures that broadly evoke the tradition of Egyptian funerary sculpture. As a counterpoint to the free-standing, often totemic sculptures, the exhibition also features two intimately scaled wall reliefs, where Josephsohn positions the human figure within a simplified architectural space, similarly evocative of antiquity. However, despite the sculptures’ rudimentary, roughly hewn appearance, Josephsohn in fact almost always worked from life. he raw tactility of the sculptural surface testifies to the spontaneity of creation, its countless revisions, and the immediacy of the encounter between the artist and his model. From 1947 onwards, Josephsohn modelled many of his early sculptures after Mirjam Abeles, whom he would later marry in 1954 and who is explicitly identified in the title of three sculptures on display, often recognizable from the suggestion of a necklace around her neck.
Josephsohn was not interested in capturing the naturalistic appearance of his models. Rather, he sought to convey their unadulterated individuality, to lay bare their life-force by stripping away matter with little respect for outward appearances. Reflecting on these early, stele-like sculptures, Josephsohn explained, “whenever I saw a model that was narrow and slender … I felt an irresistible urge to reduce or alter it to such an extent that only the core of the matter remained. […] I simply wanted to penetrate to the core of the matter and not get stuck on the external impressions of nature.”
In their simplified angularity, Josephsohn’s early sculptures inhabit an ambiguous space between past and present. Despite their aura of antiquity, these haptic surfaces seem to record the scars of the 20th Century, while also expressing the obstinate endurance of the individual. Although Josephsohn led a reclusive life, his choice to model the human figure, again and again over several decades, marked an act of resistance: “I have a feeling I have never accepted life as it is. But of course, that gave me the strength to put something else in its place; to show how it should be. I suppose philosophers would call it utopian.”
