The Grusinian Dancers (1971) created by Joachim Bandau (born 1936, lives and works in Aachen) last moved in Nuremberg back in 1972. These white plastic kinetic sculptures are made up of six different elements from an ingenious modular system. The figures slowly move through space, collide, turn back, suddenly stop, continue. A ballet performed by robots, fascinating but oppressive. Back then, the artist took the inspiration for the title from a TV feature on Georgian (Grusinian) dancers.
The Grusinian Dancers have now been reactivated for the show at Neues Museum, which is dedicated to a group of Bandau's anthropomorphic sculptures dating from the last 1960s and early 1970s. They reflect his intense and decidedly political inquiry into the image of man in a world of social pressures and alienated technology. Joachim Bandau himself says these sculptures can be seen as "primordial images of a progressively self-deforming society," but they are compellingly beautiful. Shaped in light of the design of the day and science-fiction fantasies, today they seem to once again be highly contemporary.