Fifty Hair Bones and Sun Disk (To the students of the Aachener Werkkunstschule)

US American sculptor Nancy Graves had a wide-ranging interest in natural science. This is substantiated by, among other things, the large library she left at her death in 1995. It included hundreds of books on anthropology, ancient civilisations and even space exploration. On trips to Europe with her husband at the time, artist Richard Serra, Graves developed an interest in archaeology and palaeontology. She began to produce objects shaped as bones, made by hand using a mixture of materials such as wax, acrylic and marble dust. The fragile work that you can see before you is reminiscent of the structure of a tent, of a relict of archaic architecture, of stone-age or mythical-religious objects whose definitive meaning we can never reconstruct. They confront the modern exhibition space with an aura of spirituality. Other works from the same period are titled ‘Totem’ or ‘Shaman’. With these fossil sculptures, as she called them, Graves set off on a mythical journey into a fictitious archaeology of human civilisation. The sculptures were so expensive and time-consuming to produce that soon after Graves turned to painting until, years later, she discovered bronze casting for her work. In order to better understand this work its prior history and how it became part of the mumok collection is enlightening. In 1969 Graves made a series of works that were immediately successful. She exhibited in the Whitney Museum in New York and, at the age of 30 was the youngest artist to have done so at the time. Collector Peter Ludwig of Cologne purchased two of these works. Thereafter, in 1971, Ludwig organised a Nancy Graves exhibition in the Ludwig Forum in Aachen which he had founded. Graves, who made a number of trips to Aachen to install the exhibition, was assisted by a team of students from the Aachen Werkkunstschule [Aachen Art College] in producing the works for the exhibition. ‘50 Hair Bones and Sun Disk’ is the result of this collaboration which was apparently so inspiring that Graves dedicated the work to the students. Wolfgang Hahn, a restorer and friend of Peter Ludwig, bought the work and the mumok acquired it from him in 1978.