Robert Koenig's is a unique voice in British Sculpture, indeed it is doubtful that his work can properly be said to be British. It is European Sculpture, not as a transnational and indistinct idea of the modern world, but the product of a specific region and time, speaking through history.
Koenig is part of a tradition that is resurfacing after a time of near invisibility. The work that he was making ten years ago in retrospect looks curiously prescient. He drew from a culture of carving that was rooted in the folk art of Central Europe; a naturalist depiction of the world with mythic overtones. Translated into the language of the modern world the work took on a peculiarly complex role.
With the end of the modern period, the abandoning of progress and the catastrophic collapse of European ideology, there emerges into the light a world long suppressed, thought to have been dead and to have been buried beneath the onward rush of history. It is a world that is fearful and confused. A world of longing for identity; beneath the cry of competing nationalisms is the idea of a people, of the community, not as a liberal model of virtue but as the bond of identity and an expression of belonging. Powerful ties of blood and the land reassert themselves but now in the guise of the present.
At its extreme is the turmoil and bitter retribution at the edge of Europe but elsewhere it is the sullen expression of a confused longing for certainty. It is all the more fearful in that it happens in a world that we recognise; the banal world of the everyday. The ordinary and familiar are disturbed, as though, walking across a field of snow, we come across a crack through which we see water below slow and turbid. Walking on, the land is not the same. So it is in Europe today.
There is the insiduous realisation that everything is changed. To speak of this change is to acknowledge history. A history bound up with myth, with the ancient voices of attachment to the land, of a place and of a people. The siren songs that drew whole continents to war and barbarism; that shaped our lives. Myths that have long been consigned to textbooks as the archaic remnant of a world long past.
It is no coincidence that the small renaissance of wood carving apparent in Europe should have happened in Germany; in our century the focus of the long struggle of nationalism and mystery. It was given impetus and found acceptance through the painted wood sculpture of Georg Baselitz. In the line of Kirschner's expressionist figures the wood is scarred and the heads, excessive and gestural, have pigment dragged across them. They are the heads of idols, of ancestors. They came out of the expressionist tradition but made space effectively for other artists to be seen.
It is against this background that Robert Koenig works. Previously the respectable inheritance of folk art as wood sculpture lay in large part through Brancusi and the relation of the modern to tradition that he described. In retrospect it can be seen that Koenig's work in the early 1980's prefigured a very different pattern. Taking the material and manner of folk carving in central Europe he also took a sense of inheritance; but he places it in a world that is no longer modern. He recognised that the relationship of history, tradition and myth was a profoundly complex one having the very greatest significance for the present.
Whilst he could not have predicted the social and political upheaval that has since seized Europe, he obsessively addressed these questions; how can we understand history as being one with ourselves? How are the deep and irrational longings of human beings to be understood in a society that has consigned those instincts to the past? How does myth shape us? Far from being a marginal artist working in an alien tradition Koenig should be seen as working through ideas that are quite central to an understanding of Europe today. Even in his most decorative work he follows a tradition that combines craft and art in the exploration of cultural inheritance. In the repeated pattern of leaves for example, the leaves are of wood, the repeated motif is pattern-making, but pattern-making which just as in its apparent model each leaf is necessarily different. Of course it is not a tree or group of leaves but the representation of a familiar depiction of a tree in folk art. It is shown in the community alongside similar representations: the highly mediated graphic symbols of commercial logos.
Significantly Koenig also uses classical models carved in wood; the sophisticated signs of ”high” culture and mythology in the medium and manner of traditional and debased „low” culture. Excoriating the false break; high and low. But most important of all are the single figures that inhabit this landscape. Frequently isolated, sometimes carved at speed, sketched in, sometimes in naturalistic detail, they inhabit the space of the world. Quite ordinary they disrupt the smooth skin of the familiar. These people are so intensely felt, though still, often inward looking and self contained; they fill us with disquiet. Around them is the depiction of the cultural world in the patterns of myth and of history, and the complex interaction of the present with the past. But in their presence there is the loss and anguish of the desperate dilemma, focused in our recognition of another human being who is at once seperated from and within history, the dilemma that we share. It is the great and undeniable strength of Koenig's work that from the most simple gestures, he most seemingly naïve articulaton, he describes a figure of pathos.
Koenig's works are shown in public and private spaces that constantly recuperate their meaning. By the chance of the market, almost inadvertently, the social implication of Koenig's work, that is; the speaking of an everyday life permeated by history and myth; is reinforced in the way it is shown and the space it inhabits. In parks and pedestrian malls, in hospitals, gardens, and houses, this social implication is subsumed into the commerce of the everyday. This is the communal space of which he speaks. It is time that Koenig's work was reexamined in its true place. Seen in the context of Europe today; the place in which we live; the context of the struggle of identity and the community; of myth and of history.
Craigie Horsfield
29 May 1992