Kreiser Axel

Born in Backnang, Germany in 1962, Axel Kreiser studied sculpture at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, where he has been head of the metal sculpture department since 2009. Axel Kreiser is represented at the 9th Swiss Sculpture Triennial with his work "Flint". The title of the work refers to the flint from which the first tools, such as hand axes or hatchets, were made in early times.

A characteristic feature of these flint tools is the fact that only concave craters were created during the carving process. This is no coincidence, but a consequence of physics. However, art cannot be about simply following chance or physics and thus natural order and disorder in order to depict something that already exists. For Axel Kreiser, the reason for a sculpture lies rather in the unknown, which emerges behind the random and beyond a known canon of forms in the conscious artistic act and can be artistically explored. Thus the formal basis for the sculpture "Flint" is initially the discovery and challenge of the existing concave form itself. However, the concave elements in Axel Kreiser's sculpture only come together in a stringent compositional approach and in an exciting rhythmisation of line, surface and volume to form a whole that is as complex as it is poetic. 

Quote

«All the effort, dirt and noise involved in making a sculpture serves to expand one's own vision and thinking. That seems cumbersome, if regular walks were enough for great thinkers. Nevertheless, I believe in the wisdom of the hands.»