Aquatinte n°1, 2022

Robert Schad  

Robert Schad was born in Germany in 1953 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Karslruhe in 1980.

In 1985 he works on a commission by the Museum für neue Kunst and this is a turning point for his career, as from this moment on starts to use steel only in his sculptures. He uses solid steel bars with a square cross-section of 4.5 cm, and of 6 to 16 cm for the outdoors pieces he creates. The bars stay close to the human proportion and the hand keeps a close contact with the material. It is the hand that handles the object in space, much as a hand-held pencil. Robert Schad draws with his steel bars.

The steel is not forget, it is cut and welded. Robert Schad breaks all possible curves. He imposes an apparently jerky rhythm and inscribes it in an undulation that makes us think of choreography.

The objects don?t have a basis, they seem to come out of the ground as trees or to touch the ground like the steps of a person. There is a certain unbalance in the dynamic of the shapes, but also a certain stability.

The inversion that comes from the statics of any sculpture appears in a movement that is inherent to the treatment of the form, always on the verge of breaking, forcing the gaze to circulate around and through the space in order to follow the different accents of the artworks.