Horst Antes

About the artist

Horst Antes is one of the most important innovators of figurative painting and sculpture in Germany after 1945. His extensive oeuvre consists of paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, prints and works of book art. Despite differences in form and content, his works, created over more than six decades, often share a hermetic, enigmatic and enigmatic character, combined with the artist's very own symbolism.
Antes' best-known creations include anthropomorphic art figures, also known as cephalopods, which dominated his work between 1962 and 1981. Mostly depicted as individual figures, but also as pairs, they are depicted in undefined environments, then also in surreal landscapes: Archetypes of the human being, sometimes with additions such as a ladder, pipe, tyre, snake, pigeon, hare, chair, table, spoon, feathers and sperm. These testify to Antes' interest in early forms of religion, spirituality and cult, especially those of the Pueblo Indians of North America, from whose spiritual imagery symbols have found their way into the artist's work. From 1983, he created the so-called "Votive": mythical scenes cut from very fine sheet gold, consisting of human figures and the figurative symbolic world of his artistic figures. Installed in transparent display cases, the "votives" form magical-looking sculptural ensembles of solemn reverie. The same applies to the "House Figures", which began in 1987. Their sacred solemnity and magical aura result from their hermeticism, which cannot be penetrated by the external senses. Sparse compositions of closed architecture symbolise the existential space of man, the house as a metaphor for man.
Hidden, yet existent, Antes materialises the progression of time in the "date and period pictures" he has been creating since 1989. The information on the day, month and year painted on top of each other in the picture over a certain period of time becomes increasingly difficult to read as the layers of dates are superimposed, "fading", yet remaining present. The artist meticulously lists them on the reverse.
Antes studied under HAP Grieshaber at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe from 1957 to 1959. As a scholarship holder at the Villa Romana in Florence in 1962 and the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1963, the artist spent some time in Italy in the 1960s, where he later chose to live. Antes participated in the documenta in Kassel in 1964, 1968 and 1977, the Venice Biennale in 1966 and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1991, where he was honoured with the "Grand Prize". From 1965-73 and 1985-2000 Horst Antes held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. His works are represented in museums both nationally and internationally. Born in Heppenheim in 1936, Horst Antes now lives and works in Sicellino near Siena, Karlsruhe and Berlin.