Mocube is honored to present the solo exhibition “God Formed Man from the Dust of the Ground” by the renowned Swiss master sculptor Hans Josephsohn. This exhibition also marks Josephsohn’s first solo exhibition in mainland China, featuring representative brass sculptures spanning different periods of his artistic career. Over the course of his long creative life, Josephsohn drew inspiration from the most primordial sculptural forms of prehistoric figurines, developing a distinctive artistic language that traverses the history of sculpture. Born in 1920 in Königsberg, East Prussia, into a Jewish family, Josephsohn fled Nazi Germany in 1938 to study in Florence. Soon afterward, he was forced to leave Italy due to the racial laws enacted under Benito Mussolini and eventually arrived in Switzerland. There, he worked quietly for more than half a century, dedicating himself to sculpture in its most ancient sense: the representation and commemoration of the human body—standing, seated, and reclining figures, as well as heads and busts. He was both a geographical and political exile—experiences that were clearly intertwined—and, on a cultural and aesthetic level, an exile from his own time. His parents and sisters were perished in the The Holocaust. For this solitary immigrant, “Sculpture became my homeland. The sculptors of history were my true relatives.” At the end of the Second World War, Josephsohn became a sculptor. From that historical turning point, he developed his own artistic path—one that, while acknowledging the fragility and uncertainty of humanism after the Holocaust and Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nevertheless reaffirms humanity and offers human beings an image of themselves.

Arguably, no twentieth century artists more than Henry Moore and Hans Josephsohn have so clearly linked the reposed female body to landscape forms, though whilst their sources share similarities, the results are quite different. Josephsohn’s reclining women are also organic, but they are turmoiled, craggy, broiling with energy, seemingly drawn more from beneath the surface of the earth and connecting to primordial life. —— Clare Lilley

In any Josephsohn exhibition, the overwhelming and instant impres - sion is of solitary, unyielding figures, craggy as boulders, lumbering, ungainly, constructed from rough encrusted layers. They effortlessly command the space around them, yet are elusive, reclusive, withdrawn. Early pieces are loosely representational, later ones are monumental abstractions, but they all have a reserve so deep as to be confrontational. ——JACKIE WULLSCHLÄGER