Eckhard Schene

Trophy II, 1969

Eckhard Schene’s work as a painter while he was a student and as a free-lance artist in Berlin in the 1960s placed him in a field that developed to a lyrical Hard Edge painting style. For Schene, work on his sculpture evolved from the pragmatic viewpoint of furniture making, not wishing to surrounding himself with mass-produced ‘post-war-baroque’. Then from 1968/69 came the lasting impression conveyed by the first Minimal Art sculptures appearing in a European context. A principal work, the Trophy II/69 wall sculpture is in three parts that form triangular shapes directed dynamically and almost aggressively at viewers, pointing up right and down left respectively. Here Schene is staging a fragmented quality, that may have affected himself psychologically, but above all representing the political and social realities of his time.