The Berlin sculptor Gisela von Bruchhausen is dead

At the same time, the focus was also on what was out of place and non-conformist in steel sculpture – and the decision was made to use already defined materials. The group got their material from scrap yards: sheets, rods, grids or square iron determined the shape of the sculptures.

Gisela von Bruchhausen was there when Odious formed. Together with Klaus Duschat, David Lee Thompson and other students at what is now the University of the Arts (UDK), she formed a collective. A decision that sounded almost unheard of in the heyday of artistic soloists: listening, working in a team and developing creative ideas together were not exactly among the virtues of the scene at the time.

In 2013, when Odious celebrated its 30th anniversary with an exhibition at the Georg Kolbe Museum, the artist remembered that time in an interview. There were great collaborations, but everyone also worked individually on questions that the material and the sculpture asked them.

Get to the point

For Gisela von Bruchhausen it was about putting things together. About finding the point at which the individual connects with the rest compositionally. The construction is a consequence of inner necessities in the interplay with light and space, the inner tension of each of her works a logical consequence. The fact that it takes away the weight of the steel and allows it to float seems like magic.

After a decade of using found objects, the artist changed gears and reached for “fresh steel,” which she obtained prefabricated or processed in the studio according to her ideas. Color instead of rust skin, finely accentuated, limited to blue, red or gray and individually interpreted in the most economical way. The steel is the star, the sculptor its finisher.

Her work, spanning over forty years, has grown impressively. Even without the Odious group, whose members scattered after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gisela von Bruchhausen, who only decided to study art in her late thirties after a marriage and the birth of three sons, moved to a spacious studio in Lehnin. Sculptures, reliefs and collages were created here and could be seen in Berlin’s Kajetan Gallery in 2022.

Modular and full of contrasts

“Gisela von Bruchhausen|Contained,” the title of the show, brings together works from a decade. There were a striking number of wall works, their language modular and based on contrasts. Many things seemed more fragile than the heavy steel sculptures with which the artist, who worked as Anthony Caro’s assistant in the steel workshop at the Berlin Sculpture Workshop in 1987 and later completed teaching positions at the UDK and in the Chinese metropolis of Hangzhou, made a name for herself.

But the exhibition still impressively demonstrated the artist’s consistency in dealing with her central themes: weight, dynamism, rhythm and tension.

Until a few weeks ago, her full concentration was on the catalog raisonné. “Stahl Sculptures” was published by Kehrer Verlag, the first copies have just been delivered, the two-volume work is accompanied by texts by Christian Malycha, Herann Wiesler and the artist’s long-time partner, Robert Kudielka. Shortly afterwards, on December 22nd, Gisela von Bruchhausen died in Berlin; she was 85 years old.