About

We are coming from nature and we will go to nature again

My Story

 

Michael Behrens was born in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1973. From the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts in the Netherlands he received a BFA in 2003. During studies, Behrens had a proclivity for photography and painting, but sculpture emerged as his true passion. In 2006, he founded his own studio in Düsseldorf, where he still works and lives. Two years later, right after his first solo show in Paris, France, he was invited to an exhibition at the Ernsting Foundation. His work received international attention due to strong color combinations and dynamic structures and shapes. “My vision was and is to create objects in which you can see and feel the energy of nature”, Behrens says. In this sense, till today, he created five different series: Underwater-World, Landscapes, Seaforms, Phoenix and Evolution. Since 2004 Behrens’, his work has been part of over 200 group and solo exhibitions, are regularly shown at international art fairs and in galleries, and are present in private and public collections around the globe.

About The Work

 

Michael Behrens plays with the idea of movement and balance in massive solid glass objects. The series Underwater-World and Seaforms embody decades of personal sensory experiences above and below water. Deliberately random, yet strong shapes line organic inner structures, velvet and transparent surfaces alternate, thereby creating a dynamic harmony of inside and outside. The sculptural and technical exploration of structure is concentrated in the Landscapes: form is predefined by nature, so that structure is brought to the fore. With Phoenix, Behrens focusses on the abstract formal language in his sculptural work. The observer’s eye is drawn to the outlines and surfaces as every object is opaque. Over the years, Michael has developed his exclusive and notable style and has become one of the most recognized German sculptors in his field.

The Studio

 

One foundation stone of Behrens’ career was to find the right studio an environment to handle specialized technical equipment, as a suitable power supply to install own furnaces. Behrens began to acquire a highly technical background, enabling him to run the studio independently, but also to push the limits of material and ushering in a new era of kiln casted objects. Just as design and concept, all the main works are done in the studio in Düsseldorf in hundreds of hours of preparing, model and mould making, working on the glass with different techniques, melting the objects and finally, after a long annealing period, releasing the sculpture of the mould, and grinding the structure. A team of well-trained assistants allows to create sculptures of a specific scale. The final touch of the object surface is given by the best skilled grinders from the Czech Republic. The whole process to create this kind of sculptures is time-consuming and demanding as impatience or deviations from the production process are not forgiven.