“Two aspects in his work are of deciding importance: spontaneity and improvisation.”
Courtesy of the artist.
Benno Worth
The sculptor and painter Benno Werth, who lives and works in Aachen, can look back on a more than 60 yearsof creativity. His art work is distinguished by an enormous complexity. His oevure consists of paintings, stained glass windows, sculptures in wood and stone, metal works, drawings representing privacy, and, by contrast, landscapes, locales, fountains, hospitals, and churches. At present, Werth is working predominantly in metal sculptures and painting.
Spontaneity and improvisation are of decisive importance in Werth’s work. His bronze sculptures originate from improvisation. Normally a clay-model is the first step in the production of a sculpture. This is not the case with Werth, who directly produces a negative casting form into which he pours the liquid metal. Werth developed his unique technical process in 1962; he finds that it allows him to work and design in a more direct manner. So delicate metal structures are constructed which represent both figurative and architectonic conceptions. Changing the solid metal body into light and floating and multiplying consistency is an artistic process developed in parallel to the gestural abstract painting and lends a new dimension to Werth’s sculpture. Archaic, expressive elements recall the expressionistic and the Gothic characterize the pieces.
Werth paints with spontaneity. Each brush stroke reveals to him the character and effect of the colours. Abstract worlds appear on his canvas, colours vibrate with rich nuances. He experiments with contrasts and depth, sometimes figures and female bodies and landscapes. Apart from abstract paintings, Benno Werth occupies himself again and again with the subject of the female body. His latest works show the total figure in contrast with his earlier focus on torsos and body fragments.
In his designs, Werth sees not only problems of shape but also problems of content. There are symbolic and essential elements rising upwards and lying horizontally in colors like yellow, red, and blue. In each work, there are principles of active rising and of passive reception. These male and female motifs of creating and receiving become visible in every picture and in every sculpture. Benno Werth is an artist whose pictures reveal more than a single form.
