Untitled

Hans Josephsohn devoted his sculptural practice to the human figure. Like many of his works, this one takes the reclining figure as its subject, while others depict portraits, the figure standing at half or full-length, as well as reliefs. A distinctive ambiguity permeates this particular work. It can be read as one figure, on its side or back, caught in repose or as two figures entwined, one atop another. It can also be seen as a landscape, or a massing of material that yields to abstraction. The dark patina suggests treated metal but also conjures dirt, the first and most elemental material of sculpture; one might even think of the biblical story where God "formed man of the dust of the ground" (Genesis 2:7). Roughly hewn, Untitled’s surface implies a process of accretion and addition, with its finish of thickets and knots, places for the eye to get lost and for one reading of the work to merge into another.

Critics frequently compare Josephsohn’s work to Alberto Giacometti, another Swiss artist who pursued multiple reimaginings of the body through sculpture. But where Giacometti’s works are frequently thin and attenuated, understood in existentialist terms as reckoning with the fragility and precarity of life in a world traumatized by war, Josephsohn’s sculptures usually teem with mass. The obdurate materiality of Josephsohn’s sculptures—the protuberance of forms upon forms—seems to insist that we can’t look away from the human body, especially as its precarity in our time is only heightened. In contrast to that of Giacometti, Josephsohn’s oeuvre asserts the value of human life and what it endeavors to create. His sculpture seems "out of time," possessing a style of having no style, almost like the anonymous quality of the ruin, the artifact, the thing that survived.