Lacquer Drawings

The white, empty space—the white surface. The black steel rod—the black line of constant width, writing fragments of imagined movement into space like ciphers. Jerky impulses of movement manifest themselves as a seismogram of my bodily thinking at the intersection between absolute aleatory freedom and rational calculation. Drawing does not serve sculpture but is an independent partner on equal footing.

Several authors have repeatedly emphasized the outstanding significance of the line for Robert Schad’s sculptural work. Reinhold Happel, in the catalogue of the Städtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim (1993/94), speaks of the “development of form from the line,” in which high artistic concentration and spontaneity converge. In the same publication, Uwe Rüth highlights the line as “the actual formal means in almost all of Schad’s works.” “The line is the decisive element,” writes Johannes Odenthal in the catalogue of the Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg (2002); it “dynamizes space, forms space, and activates it.” The particular characteristics of the line’s course, its dance-like movement rhythms—the multiple angular rises and falls in expansive spatial extension—have also been frequently described.

Robert Schad himself goes far beyond formal aspects in his explanations of the role of the line in his oeuvre: “The line is not only the most important means of expression in my work, but the foundation of all human creation. The first artistic expressions of humanity are executed linearly: primitive humans left their marks on rock walls. Each of us has scribbled our first experiences onto paper in line drawings. The line has always been an elementary basis for human expressive possibilities; it is both an auxiliary and expressive means, guiding and reflecting human existence in all its facets. It is what constitutes life, as a sign of life, metaphor, and mirror of vehemence, calm, and rationality, as well as the free aleatory nature of action necessary to leave all constraints behind. With the line, one can fundamentally express everything. It accompanies humans from birth to death and beyond their physical existence. It reveals the linear progression of time, action, movement. Thus I also see the process in my sculpture as a linear transitional situation of my life within a specific temporal sequence. As long as I engage with sculpture, it will be my line that I write into space. It has to do with drawing, with marking, with circumscribing, with leading, with guiding, with experiencing; it is determined by my own existence.”

Text excerpt: Linear Spatial Sculpture by Bettina Ruhrberg