Joseph Beuys

Konrad Mönter, Meerbusch
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1995

Kleve, Städtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek, Joseph Beuys, 1991, p. 28, no. 23, illustrated in colour
Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie & Württembergischer Kunstverein; Tübingen, Kunsthalle; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Vienna, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Sammlungsblöcke. Stiftung Froehlich, 1996-97, p. 67, no. 38, illustrated in colour
London, Tate Gallery, The Froehlich Foundation. German and American Art from Beuys and Warhol, 1999, p. 67, no. 38, illustrated in colour
Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst, KunstSammeln, 1999-2000, p. 56, illustrated in colour

"With me, it's that certain question - about art, about science - interest me, and I feel I can go farthest towards answering them by trying to develop a language on paper, a language to stimulate more searching discussion - more than just what our present civilisation represents in terms of scientific method, artistic method or thought in general.  My drawings make a kind of reservoir that I can get important impulses from. In other words they're a kind of basic source material that I can draw from again and again." (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Leeds, City Art Gallery; Cambridge, Kettle's Yard Gallery; London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Joseph Beuys Drawings, 1983, p. 8)

The intrigue of Beuys's drawings lies in the abundance of ideas and their apparently chaotic methods combined with the rigorous clarity of his intellectual approach. His drawings have a highly sensitive force - their tenuous, disturbing emanations and their deliberately unbeautiful surfaces reveal more of Beuys's other nature as the gentle transformer.

Schlafender Kopf über Induktor is an incredibly dense collage of ideas and materials which employs a violet, watercolour-painted inductor laid onto a brown sheet of paper on which you can assume is a head, formed with ferrous hydroxide. This sheet is again laid down on another sheet of card. Surrounding these three different layers, Beuys has painted a form of white passe-partout on the frame and glass. The work therefore takes on the object-ness of his renowned vitrine sculptures in which he created a rich formal play between objects that may be hard or soft, open or closed, similar but not identical. In "Schlafender Kopf über Induktor" on first sight the two elements - Sleeping Head and Inductor - don't seem to have anything in common. Maybe it is exactly the tension between the process of sleeping and the production of energy which fascinated Beuys. If you sleep somehow you refuel your batteries. Beuys believed in a direct connection between movement, form and energy. An indeterminate energy is brought through movement into a certain form which is represented symbolically with the inductor: an inductor is an electrical device employed in electrical circuits for its property of inductance. An inductor works through the movement of a magnet in a coil and transforms energy. The new energy is thus pumped into the sleeping head in order to create new ideas and power. Beuys often used the idea of the 'transformer' in his drawing because it contains a transforming stimulus which includes the transformation of concepts, of real events, of social institutions, of technology and of the human circulatory system. In his mind, everything in the present has to be transformed; otherwise there would be no future.