Körper
Sculpture
Stoneware and glaze
61 × 20 × 17 cm
Unique work, 2026
Körper, German for body, is a series of hand-built stoneware sculptures that considers how emotion, movement, and physical sensation can become form without becoming illustrative.
The works move between abstraction and bodily suggestion. Leaning volumes, openings, adjoining elements, and supports create shifting configurations of balance, pressure, contact, and separation. Although still, the sculptures retain a sense of vibration, suggesting bodies that carry weight, resist gravity, hold tension, or preserve the memory of motion.
Informed by Zeynep Boyan’s ongoing interest in choreography and somatic movement, Körper approaches sculpture as a body in relation. Bases and supports are active parts of each composition, shaping whether a form appears grounded, suspended, protected, exposed, stable, or poised to move. The series explores the tension between movement and stillness, closeness and distance, and the ways emotion can be held within material form.
“Can a sculpture behave like a body—carrying weight, resisting gravity, holding tension, and preserving the memory of motion?”
References
i. Martha Graham dancing in Frontier, 1935. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 01508. Photo, Barbara Morgan.
iii. Constantin Brâncuși, Léda, 1926.
ii. Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Imaginary Landscapes, 1979.
iv. Ohad Naharin, Last Work, 2015.
v. Sharon Eyal, Delay The Sadness, 2025.
vii. Sharon Eyal, Delay The Sadness, 2025.
viii. Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Cave of Heart, 1946.
vi. Sharon Eyal, Two Chapters of Love, 2023.
ix. Sharon Eyal, Delay The Sadness, 2025.