Joachim Berthold

Art Brokerage: Joachim Berthold German Artist: b. 1917-1990. Joachim Berthold, born 1917 in Eisenach, lived and worked until his death in 1990 in Oberaudorf am Inn. In 1936 he began his training at the renowned Werkschule in Cologne. There he met his artist colleague and later wife Gisela Berthold­. He continued his studies until 1941 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 1945 he worked as a freelance sculptor. This was followed by hard artist years in which the execution of any commissioned work to secure a livelihood left little time for free work. Gradually, the situation improved until, from the 1960s, it gained interna­tional renown through more and more numerous and important exhibitions at home and abroad, large orders from industry and cities as well as mu­seum acquisitions. Berthold's appearance was striking. This corresponds to his figurative, mainly in bronze realized small to larger than life ­sized sculptures. The to­pic of his work was the man. He was not concerned with the representation of individual, external manifestations. His sculptures are reduced to the essentials, re­ main in their economical movements, wi­thout facial expressions, anonymous and timeless. The essence of man and his development between becoming and decay were his concerns. Through the mental processing of Greek me­taphors, he concentrated on the depiction of the human forms involved in a matter or in their own body form and dissolving out of it, as well as cast their own shadow. Berthold's typical formal idiom lives from the antago­nism of convex and concave, perfectly smoo­thed and rough, sometimes broken surfaces, exposing the underlying innermost amor­phous layers. Listings wanted.