Christian Lemmerz (born January 30, 1959) is a German-Danish sculptor and visual artist who attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara, Italy, from 1978 to 1982 and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1983 to 1988.
[1] Despite classical sculpture training in Carrara, Lemmerz drew his main inspiration from the post-war process-oriented pop art, not least from his fellow countryman, Joseph Beuys.
And as a matter of fact, sculpture is particularly suitable for establishing a confrontational and experience-exchanging situation, especially when it is perceived from a phenomenological point of view.
[8] Lemmerz' approach can be seen as a rejection of the formal idiom in favour of experimentation with material aesthetics, often evoking illness, death or philosophy.
[6] Lemmerz has worked as a scenographer in Steven Berkoff's Brok[clarification needed] (1994) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1996).
Current political and ethical questions become endowed with a clearer voice through the works, which always, in terms of their form and content, constitute a transformation from recognizability to the more veiled or unknown, inasmuch as Lemmerz is working rhizomatically, where the assertion sometimes assumes a classically distinct form and sometimes manifests itself with a gestural formlessness.
[10] For the exhibition Scene at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum in 1994, Lemmerz worked with blood-smeared surfaces and decomposing pigs' carcasses in glass-walled, steel-framed vitrines inspired by traditional still lifes where inanimate objects are often used as existential symbols.
The audience might have wondered if the pigs were brutally killed for the exhibition or if they died a natural death, much like they would with the artwork Away from the Flock from 1994 by British artist Damien Hirst.