The female torso appears somewhat “headless”; the face is hidden behind the folded, raised arms. What also disappears through this posture, slipping into the invisible, are the hands. Anyone familiar with Dietrich Klinge’s work will know how important the hand is in his oeuvre – here it is not visible.
According to historical anthropology, the use of the hand indicates first the evolutionary and later the civilizational stage of human development. But if the person, like Klinge’s sculpture, has no hands? Are they then uncivilized? Actually, they are not missing, they are merely withdrawn from use. Or they are even deliberately dispensed with in order to draw attention to essential circumstances: With the hand, the physical human being contacts the material world around him, touches objects as well as fellow human beings. The touch becomes a grasping, a holding. The person “grasps” the object and makes sure of it. But the hand can also squeeze in a stranglehold, become invasive, exercise illegitimate power. The artist leaves open the extent to which the use of the hand has positive or negative connotations. However, by reminding us how infinitely diverse it is, how incomparably unique and irreproducible, he throws us back to his unique sculpture, which itself determines how many or how infinitely many possible views it offers us.
