Siegbert Reinhard Paper Sculpture "Hung-Up!?"

Siegbert Reinhard (German-born American, b.1941). "Hung Up!?" paper sculpture, n.d. Edition 67 of 225. Signed at upper right and numbered at upper left. A three-dimensional paper sculpture in low relief, worked entirely in white cut, scored, and folded paper and set against a tan diaper-patterned ground. The scene is a hallway peg rail: a jacket slumped on one hook, a walking stick hung on another, and between them a hat, coat, trousers, and shoes suspended in the exact posture of a body that is no longer inside them. Nobody is home, and yet somebody is unmistakably hanging there. Reinhard files the piece under humor, and the joke runs on absence: the wearer has been subtracted, the clothes keep the pose. Signed at upper right and numbered at upper left, 67 of 225, and presented under a deep acrylic case that the relief requires. About the artist: Germany gave Siegbert Reinhard his early training in design and composition. He arrived in the United States in 1961 at twenty and enrolled at the Art Center School in Los Angeles to deepen it. The fifteen years that followed were remarkably prolific: animated television commercials by the dozen, title sequences for motion pictures, and over a hundred life-sized paper sculptures built as scenic set pieces for the variety-show circuit. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Diana Ross, Bill Cosby, and Carol Burnett all staged specials that leaned on his work. He walked away from that studio, and from Hollywood, in 1974. Westport, Connecticut became home, and illustration and graphic design became the focus. New York agent Cullen Rapp took him on, and through that representation came commissions from Max Factor, the New York Times, Seagram, and Coca-Cola, along with a string of Society of Illustrators honors. He kept studying even as the client list grew, splitting further coursework between the Art Center School and New York's School of Visual Arts. By 1976, a different kind of work was reaching print: fine art posters and prints built on musical subjects, pitched somewhere between fantasy and comedy. One piece from this period defined his reputation more than any other. "The Rehearsal," a four-by-six-foot sculptural rendering of the Alban Berg String Quartet, traveled to the Oakland Art Museum, North Carolina's Mint Museum, and the New-York Historical Society, and carried his name well beyond the illustration world. Demand for his paper sculpture in limited-edition form, what collectors call "multiple originals," pushed Reinhard toward a technical problem: how to cast an original in resin without losing anything of what made it an original. He solved it, producing castings that hold the fine detail and surface quality of the source piece intact. The work has changed shape again in recent years. Reinhard now builds non-representational, self-contained paper sculpture from a single blank sheet, cut and torn and folded into form, nothing added and nothing taken from elsewhere. The results lean on geometric structure but never lose the humor and play that mark everything else he has made, alongside an exacting eye for design and clarity. His freestanding sculptures, geometric in the same way, manage to suggest movement and gesture through very little. More than two hundred galleries worldwide have shown his work, which now sits in both private hands and public collections. Item # 204852

Estimate:$400

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