Alexander Föllenz
Alexander Föllenz, born in Koblenz in 1986, lives and works in Düsseldorf. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Prof. Lucy Mckenzie and became a master student of Prof. Andreas Gursky.
His sculptures are reminiscent of iconic motifs from art history and convey eternal themes of humanity. Föllenz deals with topics such as violence and suffering, Eros and Thanatos, vanitas, power and powerlessness, cult, self-image, and identity—in a thoroughly ironic and playful manner.
Föllenz creates hybrids: heroes who must suffer for their hubris, bound and tortured titans, martyrs. They are abstract prototypes, appearing like cyborgs and confronting us with the fundamental question of whether free will exists and, if so, how far it might extend. Figures who repeatedly lose their balance and must reposition themselves.
In this way, he concretizes archetypes, universal primal images anchored in the human psyche, cross-cultural and cross-epochal themes, and forces of the collective unconscious in figurative forms. Föllenz joyfully draws on heroic mythologies to create allegories associated with modern superheroes. “Devotion” reminds us of Prometheus and reflects on the constraints that trap people in the here and now and shackle their own talents and ambitions.
The characters have something tragic and sublime about them, but this impression is immediately relativized by the fact that they are presented as “tumbler toys” – an idea by Antje Reiber. Föllenz always greets us with a good dose of humor. This allows the great themes of humanity to be taken with a wink, i.e., in a lighthearted manner—entanglement in circumstances and constraints, power and powerlessness, self-assertion and the pursuit of freedom, desires for protection, belonging, and—nevertheless—uniqueness. Life and death.
Föllenz’s large-format VENUS OF OLYMPIA – with the head of Venus de Milo and the body of a female bodybuilder – stands on a historic pedestal in Jacobipark in Düsseldorf.
AG18 presents Alexander Föllenz at the Art Düsseldorf Artfair 2026
