Dimensions: 130 x 143 x 35 cm and 130 x 50 x 46 cm (51 x 56 1/4 x 13 3/4 and 51 x 19 3/4 x 18 in.)

Since the 1960s, Ulrich Rückriem, a trained stonemason, has been an important representative of Minimalism and exerted a great influence on modern sculpture in his rejection of figurative representation. The volume of the stone and its interaction with the surrounding space is his theme. His sculptures clearly and intentionally show traces of the processing. Rückriem works according to the principle of division and with the techniques of splitting and cutting. He is concerned with elementary categories of sculpture: the object, its relationship to the location and the relationship of the viewer to the work. Rückriem has developed his own work technique, which focuses on the work material and the working process by doubling, dividing and reducing the material. He often cuts blocks of stone into individual pieces, which he then reassembles into a new form, as in the present untitled work.

The sculptor himself has put into words the immediacy and originality of his direct access to his material and the strict formal parameters on which his work is based: "I see a raw block and say, there's exactly one by one by one by one metre in it, and I'm going to cut it out of there. It's harder than making a sculpture, where you can always make up for it."

What remains unspoken in this laconic statement, but can be clearly read, is Rückriem's renunciation of all imitating, shape-altering sculptural interventions in his material that are not indispensable for the fundamental search for form, the creation of a concept of weight and materiality in space. Rückriem thus goes even further than the aesthetically and theoretically comparable approaches of Minimal Art or Land Art, as these also intervene in their material in a much more creative and abstract way. Rückriem's artistic approach, however, is far more rigorous. He understands the sculptural act as lying ahead of such subsequent elaborations, thus creating an idea of sculpture that is entirely its own, and in particular of sculpture in relation to the surrounding space and the viewer moving in it.