Since 2011, Galerie Fred Jahn has worked directly with the estate of the German sculptor Michael Croissant. Galerie Jahn und Jahn was established in spring 2017 and since then the artist has been jointly represented. Born in 1928 in Landau in the Palatinate region of Germany, Croissant later spent a large part of his life in the Bavarian capital of Munich, where he died in 2002.
Before Croissant arrived at his typical, geometrically reduced formal language in the mid-seventies, he was ostensibly influenced by Art Informel. Even though this term presents a problematic categorisation of his earlier sculptural works, which were often based on forms from nature transformed into amorphous structures, a better description of his style in this period refuses to be found.
Thematically, the artist devoted this ‘informel’ phase from the fifties until the early seventies to forms from nature and the human figure in the widest sense, sometimes against the backdrop of mythology, such as in the works on Ganymede and Laocoön. Croissant’s depictions of insects, sea creatures and animal skulls represent another important set of themes. Cast in bronze, surfaces extremely rugged, matte, and dark; they reveal their specific, raw materiality. Furrowed outer skin and the ability to see them from all angles advance the secret of their effect through the play between light and shadow.
The artist achieves similar results in his drawings, where expressive hatching marks – often done with graphite – are condensed into contrasting frameworks. Light and shadow, content and void, reduction and abundance are only some of the terms Croissant uses to explore the possibilities of creating a tense balance between formal reduction and spiritual agglomeration. Read More
From the 1970s on, Michael Croissant’s style changed radically in so much as he began concentrating on the most essential manifestations of the body, representing it using a repertoire of geometric forms. Any unevenness that had previously produced a play of shadows and drawn focus was eliminated. Surfaces are smooth, only interrupted by welding marks in the bronze sculptures, or by the juxtaposition of individual elements. With this forced arrangement, the artist counteracts abstraction, so that these individual elements are legible as parts of the body. In his collages and works on paper, made parallel to his sculptural works, he approached this through drawing and produced a comprehensive oeuvre. In order to show the close relationship between his works on paper and the sculptural pieces, he often chose to display them together in exhibitions.
