Christian Lemmerz – A sculptor able to capture life in marble, as a struggle between art and death

"Art has to produce effects in a challenging confrontation. In a world dominated by the media, where death and suffering are the main topics, his works are a journey that crosses identity, existence and being. "

Natural stone can be defined as more than just a material used in construction. We can tell about the natural stone that it is a living testimony of the past, of the pure creation that people still cannot explain. Each fragment is the result of a particular event, of a certain time, in a certain place. Which makes the natural stone more than it is. Only using your creativity, you will be able to see beyond its raw shape and natural stone can be tamed in the most unknown forms.

We have not yet decided who was first, the egg or the hen, but we can safely say that natural stone was always, before the time the wheel was discovered and the first shelters invented. These stories and fragments of history, available to us only by the thought had a clear witness – the natural stone – which carries even now in its structure, so much information and stories. As  past events amaze us, the age of this material — seniority which we cannot approximate – so we are now in front of its majesty and works of art that find its profile and voice through the shape of this material created by nature.

Throughout his journey around the world, natural stone developed unexplained shapes, so that you remain speechless by its transformation. Because, again, only a creative spirit and skillful hands can shape a raw natural stone. Stone sculptors, because of their hands we speak, are part of those visionaries who found in this material a way to freely express a vision, a feeling, a statement of contemporary values.

Christian Lemmerz is an artist whose extensive works support the vivacity of this material through a paradoxicity expression of a daily reality that we hide under a beautiful face – sculptures downright lugubrious created from pure material such as white marble. Based on a desire to broaden the artistic spectrum – vision and possibilities – and the need to provide durability to the prevailing conventions and a follower of pluralism, Christian Lemmerz uses various materials in his works – mineral wool, foam, margarine or chocolate and other composite materials that directly generate a much more intense effect.

Christian Lemmerz was born in 1959 in Germany, but lives in Denmark. He graduated in Italy, as master in sculpture at "Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara". Although the emphasis is on marble sculpture, he made a name for himself in several artistic fields – from film, painting, drawing, to performance art and installations.

In 2017, at the 57-edition of the Venice Biennale, Khora VR launches its new Khora Contemporary project, a virtual reality campaign specifically born to allow artists to create new scenarios in which they overlap the psychological dimensions and Physical. Christian Lemmerz is one of the artists who participates with one of his works "La Apparizione" – a work that gives the visitor a narrow experience with a burning corpse of Jesus Christ dripping golden blood into the physical space of the viewer, to destroy the religious stereotypes.

It approaches topics such as sacred and profuse, diseases, vices, depravation and death, visions that you don't really find in stone sculpture. All these topics are just reflections of modern myths in everyday life, the archetyes, which if we look into the deep we realize that there are things we meet again and again. Beyond a raw stone and a sculpture there is a philosophy and a much powerful thinking. His touch spreads between, on the one hand, the writings of Kant, Heidegger and other Philosophans and, on the other hand, these taboo themes taken from contemporary or historical events.

What makes it different from other sculptors, also praised, is actually his work that provokes classical sculpture and classical visions, passing beyond these parameters, by bringing together in an opera a material as pure as white marble and grotesque presentations, in combinations with other organic materials that are far from pure. But these contrasts are the ones that highlight the message, conceived to stop you.

The aesthetic experience of his sculptures is a challenge for both the mind, as for the soul. Combining natural stone – white marble – In a statement so realistic, yet violent, he creates an emotional game based on the paradox between the material and the subject. Lemmerz creates, stimulates, illustrates and provokes the viewer, so that, instead of distinguishing ourselves, we become active participants in his work. The main point has always been on the basic emotions of human beings, where death, love, faith, freedom and oppression are at stake.

With every journey and story, natural stone developes unsuspected features, available only for the true believers in this in this material, to finally be able to shape it in a way that transmits something. Along with the information carried within for decades, natural stone gets to be a masterpiece of nature.