Reinhard Jacob

The sculptor Reinhard Jacob, who sees himself as an alchemist, is a holistically thinking custodian of what has been achieved. He is consciously suspicious of absolutising principles and ideological orientations, value-oriented in the best sense and full of humility in the sense that he defends the grown traditions and cultural lore.

Jacob sees himself "as a minorite in the silence of the workshop ... in possession of the instruments, but not sure of them." He has created figures, portraits (heads and busts), figurative picture plates, commemorative plaques, medals and coins, as well as sculptural decoration for buildings. He is interested in plural intensities in interior and exterior spaces.
In Berlin, Hamburg and Salzburg, he devoted himself to elaborate designs for the hotel industry and in private interiors, which he often executed himself.

In densely populated cities, he sees the creation of atmospheric presence in spaces that radiates out to the milieu quality of the surroundings as an increasingly necessary and, for him, pleasurable task.
He works less on interior worlds than on palpable and spatially extended sensory unfoldings. The intact figure and an unbroken corporeality are what Jacob has in mind for this as an intellectual volume – in the understanding that his work is merely a concomitant of waiting and a mitigation of the pain in the face of the finitude of all being.

What he strives to capture is the beautiful "as the beginning of the terrible, which we can still just bear", as Rilke famously put it. He opposes the current conventions with his formal language principles of balance.