18 November 2022 until 27 August 2023

Norbert Kricke has provided art with groundbreaking impulses since 1945. To this day, his
works have lost none of their dynamism. This year, the artist and former rector of the
Düsseldorf Art Academy would have been 100 years old. On this occasion, the museum
Küppersmühle in cooperation with the Freundeskreis Norbert Kricke e.V. honors the artist with the
special exhibition “Movement in Space”, which will be presented on the upper floor of the new
MKM building from November 18.

Around 40 spatial sculptures from three decades will be on display. A special emphasis is placed
on the late work of the years 1975-1984. Also on display are graphic
works up to his last drawings, the unique “Schlussstrichen”.
While Kricke’s first works in the 1940s still contain the formal language of classical
figurative sculptures, from the
1950s onwards the artist – in the spirit of Art Informel – quickly found his actual plastic
design medium in the filigree, flexible wire frame, to which he was to remain artistically faithful from then on. His radical departure from the
classical concept of sculpture was characterized by his interest in the representation of space
and time. In 1954, he postulated: “My problem is not mass, it is not figure, it is
space and it is movement – space and time.”

Instead of using compact mass volumes made of materials such as marble, stone and bronze to form a
closed surface and thus displace space, Norbert
Kricke strove for an artistic unity of sculpture, space and movement, not as a
representation of the real, but as a primary experience. Thus the lines, which are bundled,
curved, overlapping and exploring the pictorial space, are always open to it. They offer
visitors new opportunities for confrontation and
experience, both visually and conceptually, every time they approach Kricke’s “spatial sculptures”.