Christian Lemmerz

The span of Christian Lemmerz' oeuvre is extensive and pluralistic. Regardless of the material, the form or the medium employed, Lemmerz’ work can generally be characterized by aesthetics of effect. The artworks grasp out and clutch into the surrounding environment and call for more than mere contemplation.

On the basis of an urge to widen the artistic possibilities and a need to offer resistance to the prevailing conventions, Lemmerz makes use of stone wool, foam rubber, margarine, chocolate and other composite materials that effectively elicit an intensely direct affect. He yearns to create an imbalance on different levels. The artist formulates a couple of sculptural conceptions, “the impossible sculpture” and the “pre-linguistic” sculpture,” by means of which he links up his project with Heidegger's reflections on being and his rumination on everything's – and especially art's – beginnings, hereby aiming at creating paths more than just artworks.

Current political and ethical questions become endowed with a clearer voice through the works, which always, in terms of their form and content, constitute a transformation from recognizability to the more veiled or unknown, inasmuch as Lemmerz is working rhizomatically, where the assertion sometimes assumes a classically distinct form and sometimes manifests itself with a gestural formlessness. His whole pluralistic oeuvre is bound together, at the same time, by the fragment – as an open and processual figure.

For his artistic achievements, Lemmerz was honoured with Thorvaldsen's Medal in 2009 and the Eckersberg Medal in 2008. In 2015 he received the New Carlsberg Foundation's Artist Grant.

Lemmerz has worked as a scenographer in Steven Berkoff's Brok (1994) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Petra von Kants bitre tårer (1996). He is also the author and director of A.L.P. Traum, an interpretation of the end of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (Edison 1997). This novel also inspired Lemmerz and Michael Kvium's The Wake (2000), an eight-hour silent movie, available in several versions. Within the last decades, Christian Lemmerz has resumed his work with marble and thus enters into a sculptural tradition that dates back to the Renaissance and Neoclassicism; examples of this is his Todesfigur (2012 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek) and the Marble Altar in Lyngby Church (2013).

For the exhibition Scene at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum in 1994 Christian Lemmerz was working with blood smeared surfaces and decomposing pigs' carcasses in glass-walled, steel framed vitrines inspired by traditional still life's where lifeless objects are often used as existential symbols. The exhibition was actualizing the universal theme of death and the transitorial through sculptures that were contemporary in their form and presentation. The installation ensnared the audiences into a limbo of intrigue and disgust, making it close to impossible to look away. Audience might have wondered, if the pigs were brutally killed for the exhibition or if they died a natural death, much like they would around the artwork Away from the Flock from 1994 by British artist Damien Hirst. The banality of the pigs and their known similarity to humans give the work its emotion. With Scene, Lemmerz' was working within a psychological borderline area, where the very notion of sculpture had been distended to its most extreme implications.

In the early 1980s Lemmerz was part of the Danish artist collective Værkstedet Værst and the performance group Performancegruppen Værst. Here he conducted numerous performances from 1985 to 1994; many of these alongside life-long friend and artist Michael Kvium.

Christian Lemmerz (born January 30, 1959) is a German-Danish sculptor and visual artist, who attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, Italy from 1978-82 and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1983-88. Despite the classic sculptor training in Carrara, Lemmerz drew his main inspiration from the post-war process-oriented Pop Art; not least from his fellow countryman, Joseph Beuys.