Hans Josephsohn’s work is characterised by his fascination with mass and form in space. Over the course of a six decade-long career, he continuously recalibrated dimensions and the relationship with their surroundings, by means of specific and repeatedly recurring forms. Josephsohn worked in distinct genres, among them the standing figure, the reclining figure, the half-figure and reliefs, as presented in the current exhibition. His sculptures are characterised by an urgent sense of physical materiality. For the artist, the human being manifested itself in the body, and human existence was characterised by its corporeality.

The selection of works in the exhibition at Bleibtreustraße 45 is based on the architecture of the gallery, which was originally designed as a residential space. The sculptures and reliefs blend harmoniously into each room, calling attention to the proportions of the works within their surroundings. Josephsohn’s large half-figure Untitled (Ruth) from 1974–75 does not transgress this framework but instead emphasises the difference in scale between smaller works, including an intimately- sized standing figure from 1957, at just over 70 cm height. In the second room, various human and possibly sculptural figures are grouped together in a relief, with two sculptures in a similar style – a standing woman and a small half-figure – from the same artistic period placed opposite. The third room presents a small, figurative bust Untitled, 1969 beside a larger-than-life, strongly abstracted bust, revealing the fluid complexity of Josephsohn’s approach to the genre of the half-figure. The last room is dominated by the sculptor’s reclining figure Untitled, 1965 and the distinctly vertical orientation of the early stele, demonstrating the contrast between the horizontal and vertical orientation at play within his oeuvre. The exhibition is not structured chronologically, but is rather oriented towards the dialogues that develop between Josephsohn’s sculptures and the surrounding architectural space.

Consisting of a group of life-size, hand-painted bronze female figures – nude or partially clothed – these new works operate along a scale of fleshy realism at one end, to anatomical waywardness and extreme surface turbulence at the other. Deviations from the norms of anatomy include supernumerary limbs, rampantly burgeoned hands, and strange outgrowths that might be outlandish hairdos or unexpected handles. Additionally the paintwork by turns emphasises and blurs distinctions between flesh and clothes, or suggests other kinds of ornamental surfaces.

Cropped, pasted, painted and scanned, the exhibited works testify to Prince’s longstanding preoccupation with collecting and repurposing images while placing a renewed emphasis on the importance of the corporeal in his oeuvre. In these compositions, Prince splinters and reassembles photographic fragments of the female figure with varying degrees of legibility. The resulting collages assemble a new ‘body’, complicating notions of authorship and building on the tradition of figure painting.

Fragmented and removed from their original context, some body parts remain recognisable as breasts, buttocks, bellybuttons and torsos, while others appear entirely abstracted, their curvatures recalling landscapes or dispersing into pure form. From up close, certain skins are grainy and textured, while the glossy surfaces of others evoke the cool smoothness of classical busts.