Peter Jacobi

Peter Jacobi’s post-minimalist approach of matter, either stone, marble, plaster, iron or wood, reflects a reconception of sculpture which has to do with intermediality. Born in 1935 in Ploiești/RO, he moves to Germany in 1970 after his participation at the Venice Biennale with a large-scale textile environment co-authored with Ritzi Jacobi in the Romanian Pavilion. The way in which his sculptures interfere with the series of collaborative works, produced alongside Ritzi Jacobi during the 1960s and 1970s, translates in the process of spatialisation of tapestry or in the introduction of new techniques, such as the textile cables. The mid-1960s sculptures, entitled Draped Torso, indicate the first associations with fibre art, performing a shift towards the abstractisation of form which increases in his later sculptural work. The theme of draping, of folding returns later in his marble pieces in the attempt to capture the fluid tactility of the fabric in the solid matter, showing a concern for the material as trace, as an imprint of reality. His engagement with simplicity of forms and further with the roughness of materials, visible in his series of sculptures from late 1970s until today, has to do with his concern with temporality. The treatment of surface infer unexpected associations with a sensuousness and an emotional heaviness, mostly present in his public commissions, such as the modular columns, the open constructions or the memorials, The World War II Memorial in Pforzheim, Resurrection in Stuttgart and Helsinki or The Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest.