Skulpturenpark Köln

With his serial sculpture Acht Helle, Hubert Kiecol took the clerestory windows cut irregularly into the Foundation’s building as his subject and to eight of them added sculptural frames that combine into a frieze, in this way creating a wall-spanning aspect. Thus interplay was produced between volumes that protrude and others that recede. The reflection of the outside wall in the glass panes is a mirroring effect that lends the sculpture its enormous lightness.

For his sculptural installations Hubert Kiecol (b.1950 in Bremen) employs a formal idiom that shows traces of architectural Constructivism and Minimalist concentration. Works made from concrete and iron like Am Anfang (1992) or Tor (1997) are, if removed from their context, not only direct interventions in spatial perception, they become the basis for an "amplitude of meaning" with a metaphysical dimension. Kiecol, whose graphic and sculptural work was last exhibited in 2006 at MuHKA, Antwerp and Häusler Contemporary in Munich, has been professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf since 1993. He was awarded the Wolfgang-Hahn Prize in 2000.

The second work by Hubert Kiecol with the title Rheinwein was designed for the inside wall of the Sou Fujimoto’s Garden Gallery and, with its black enframing elements, represents a graphic contrast to the architecture, whose window motifs, at the same time, are quoted. The fact that we recognize the motifs behind both Kiecol’s works is a sign that intentionally manifests the link between the park’s buildings; the Foundation’s house and the Garden Gallery provide the wall-support for two different works with the same sculptural vocabulary, all of which sets up a relationship across the dimensions of the park.

Hubert Kiecol lives and works in Düsseldorf and Cologne.