Sculpture: "Ikarus Off"

"Pteroentea Epea"
"WINGED WORDS:" The Art of Klaus Pfeiffer
 

For many years and in many works, the flight of Daidalos and his son have preoccupied the art and work of Klaus Pfeiffer. In sculpture, the master craftsman takes off with wings of wire which lift a body made of the head of a goat, sacrificed in ancient Greek religion. Those wings have taken Daidalos to America, twice to Los Angeles and once to Indiana via Athens, Paris, London, and New York, the personal traveling companion of the TWA pilot who was honored to escort the earliest man to fly! His son, Icarus, had an unhappy end in his first - and last - flight, immortalized in Roman frescoes and in the paintings of Breughel. But he lives and flies again in the Greek islands: an elaborate machine which recalls Leonardo Da Vinci launches him into a more successful flight ("Ikaros Taking Off") and real feathers carry him ("small Ikarus"). He flies again with wings of canvas which make literal the linen wings which once carried boats, in the form of sails ("Ikaros Off" - Kienast collection). In the work of Pfeiffer, even the Minotaur, the monster created with the art of Daidalos, acquires wings of island feathers for sharing the flight invented by Daidalos ("Minotaur shortly before taking off"). 

In my favorite Gesamtkunstwerk of his oeuvre, a ship carries the many creatures of his imagination on a voyage of adventure ("Ship of Fools:" various versions). Based on a lost painting work of Hieronymous Bosch which survives only in a study, this mobile sculpture brings together many of the themes in the work of Klaus Pfeiffer, islander and artist. Suspended in air or on a base of marble, this creation celebrates the wings of bird and man, the human and the animal, the found and the made, the lightness of feathers and the weight of lead. Only a craftsmen of the Greek islands and a reader of Greek mythology can travel on such a boat, which carries the work of Klaus Pfeiffer into the future. 

Sarah Morris
Professor of Classics 
Institute of Archeology 
University of California 
Los Angeles, California 
 

 

new-found-land

Klaus Pfeiffer works under the aegis of the early European Renaissance and he has chosen to invest his labyrinthine world with the clarity of the Aegean.
These stories, disperate in tone and period, are orchestered by the painters eye and experience. The forms are unified in the meticulous use of his medium. The delicacy of water-colour creating marble music.

Antony Baynes
Old Minster Lovell, Oxford, England
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new-found-land

Pfeiffer the painter, also a precise draughtsman, a brilliant colorist, in part savage satirist and in part a liberated and joyful fantasist, one whose images create a complex world.

Prof. Ralph Bates,
City University New York, N.Y., USA
 
 
 

Klaus Pfeiffer is essentially known as a painter. Two-dimensional images are, however, but one manifestation of his agile and imaginative mind. Pfeiffer defies any kind of categorization - he moves with elegance and skill from one medium to another. Nevertheless, his decision to explore a theme in either painterly or sculptural terms, is never an arbitrary one. The artist's ability to perceive an image in various wasy is conditioned by his keen viusal sense, his tactile sensibility, imagination and wit. Nothing escapes his eye and his mind, and nothing is too sacrosanct to be transformed into an object of exquisite beauty, fun or fantasy. 

In Pfeiffer's work, the Minotaur appears as a skeleton, indicating that he is no longer alive, but did, in fact, once live in a cave. Ariadne, portrayed as a tiny Cretan Snake Goddess mounted on top of a column, is seen leading the docile skeleton of the Minotaur from the labyrinth by a flimsy leash. A proportionately larger and splendid Theseus, holding shield and spear, is shown on the left, observing this absurd spectacle. The group is mounted on a marble slab on which has been incised the seven-passaged labyrinth. 
 

Prof. K. Skawran,
Head of the Department of Fine Arts and History of Art,
University of South-Africa, Pretoria