Fabrieksprijs The Essential Joseph Beuys

Subject to passionate controversy during his lifetime, the work of Joseph Beuys is now considered one of the most significant and influential contributions to twentieth-century fine arts. This book provides a survey of Beuys’s oeuvre, which he viewed as part of a larger, philosophically based practice emphasising direct democracy, free access to education and the restructuring of society to meet ecological requirements. A total of 152 works from Beuys’s many fields of activity – drawings and watercolours, prints and multiples, sculpture and objects, spaces and actions – are arranged in chronological order, demonstrating the artist’s formal versatility, creative richness and conceptual depth. The peculiar poetry of the materials Beuys used – felt, grease, honey, wax, copper and sulfur – emerges along with the gentle melancholy suffusing the work of this sensitive agent provocateur. Alain Borer analyses Beuys’s motivation with special reference to the artist’s written and spoken statements.