The artist was born in 1939 in Wattenscheid (Germany).
He now lives and works between Austria and the United States.
Klaus Rinke is one of the major figures of German and international art. He was a teacher at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Düsseldorf from 1974 to 2005.
Seeking to understand reality in its physical and material dimension, an important part of his work aims at making the key abstract concepts that establish our relationship with the world perceptible: time, space, gravitation.
It is in the light of such experiment that he produced in the 1970’s many performances using his own body as a tool to sense and represent these notions. These performances have contributed to the development of a simple yet refined visual language, that brings shapes, gestures and elementary energies all together. The clock, frequently featured in Klaus Rinke’s work, is just as valued for its obvious relationship with counted time, than it is for its perfectly circular geometrical shape; it is around its central point that notions of time and space are articulated.
Treated as a material in itself, water also plays a prominent role in his work; he invokes its energy, its physical laws, and the symbolism of its vital role for his installations and sculptures “into action”.
If Klaus Rinke’s sculpture and performance work is at the frontier of science and art, his graphite paintings and drawings are the fruit of a research on “form”. They combine abstraction and organic reminiscences, and portray a quest for the origin of all things.