Sabina Grzimek's World
People – Animals – Landscapes
9 March – 20 April 2019, Opening: 7 March, 6-9 p.m.

Under the title “Sabina Grzimek’s World: People – Animals – Landscapes”, the Galerie Poll is presenting in its eighth solo exhibition of works from a number of creative periods by the sculptor, painter, and illustrator, who was born in Rome in 1942 and grew up in post-war Berlin.

“I am not concerned with beauty, I start from truth, from comprehension,” is how Sabine Grzimek articulates the principle that has guided her work for many years, drawing themes primarily from personal friends and experience. Her aim, though, has not only been to depict outward appearances. Rather, she is motivated by her engagement with things which are hidden, not immediately tangible. Her expressive and sensitive formal language can be situated in the tradition of sculptors such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Marino Marini, Alberto Giacometti, and Germaine Richier and their existential realism.

“Looking at her work, one always gets the impression of being able to follow something ‘behind’ the surface that has become visible. Her works appear as delicate, endangered, always somewhat agitated, searching – like gusts of wind that suddenly spring up, only to vanish with equal speed,” is how the art historian Fritz Jacobi puts it. The quality of Grzimek’s works results from the carefulness of her formations and the truthfulness of her views.

Sabina Grzimek completed her studies in sculpture at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art (Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee) in 1967 and was a master student of Fritz Cremer at the Berlin Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) from 1969 to 1972. Her works are held by in distinguished collections and museums, including the Nationalgalerie Berlin, which devoted a retrospective exhibition to her in the Altes Museum in 1992. The sculpture “Standing and Reclining Group” (1980–85), installed for this exhibition in Berlin’s Lustgarten, is now located on Lützowplatz in Berlin-Tiergarten. She also created the Gerhart Hauptmann monument (1992) in front of the museum in Erkner devoted to Hauptmann, a playwright and author, the “Weinheim Rider” in the pedestrian zone of Weinheim (1996), and the portrait of Mildred Scheel in the National Center for Tumour Diseases in Heidelberg (2010). Honours such as the Käthe Kollwitz Prize (1983) or the Honorary Award of the Minister President of the State of Brandenburg for a Lifetime Achievement (2011) are testimony to the recognition that Sabina Grzimek, who lives as a freelance artist in Berlin and Erkner, has garnered.

In 2012, with the support of private and public sponsors, the Poll Art Foundation began installing the sculptural group “Seven Gestures of The Upright Gait” (1996) by Sabina Grzimek on Garnisonkirchplatz in Berlin-Mitte. The project will continue on 14th March 2019 with the installation of the sculpture “The Thinker”, funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.