Mutations I counts among the key works of performance and action art in Europe in the 1970s, and constitutes one of Klaus Rinke’s most important pieces. Rinke, a painter and sculptor, studied at the Folkwang School in Essen. He was the first German artist to stage his productions in time and space internationally (since the late 1960s). Rinke was a pioneer in his field in that photographic sequences of his performances were featured in art exhibitions, among others at the MoMA, New York (in 1970 and 1973), the Documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), and at the XII. São Paulo Biennial (1973). From 1974 to 2004, Rinke taught sculpture as a professor at the Düsseldorf State Academy of Art. In Mutations I Rinke performs different gestures of his hands and arms before his face and torso in ways of symmetry and its cancellation. The resulting images are arranged in a striking tableau of 112 parts. They seem both familiar and alien – like a new vocabulary of body language, an expression of inner states. Two further vintage sets of Mutations I are part of the collection of the Tate Gallery in London and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
