Head
$ 900
Born in Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse, near Bensheim,
on 28 Oct 1936. The German painter, sculptor and printmaker, studied from 1957
to 1959 at the Staatliche Akademie fur Bildende Kunste in Karlsruhe, where he
was taught by the figurative painter H. A. P. Grieshaber. His early work, in
which he favoured structures created from violently flung colour, was influenced
by Art Informel and by Abstract Expressionism, particularly by the work of Willem
de Kooning.
Around 1960 he began to form such brushstrokes into a figure with firm contours
that he referred to as the Kopffussler because it consisted of only head and
limbs with no torso; this image, which he used throughout his later work as
a sign for the human form, was inspired in part by the Kachina dolls of the
North American Pueblo Indians. Antes felt a spiritual bond with the Pueblo Indians
and accepted the psychological interpretations made of his paintings; he was
interested in particular in the visit made to the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico
in the 1920s by the psychoanalysts Carl Gustav Jung and Hans Prinzhorn, and
by the affinities that they outlined in Pueblo culture, in the subconscious
and in aspects of Surrealism.
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