Robert Koenig

Robert Koenig (born 1951) is an English sculptor, who specialises in wood sculpture and is a prominent exponent of the art of woodcarving using the traditional tools of mallet and chisel.

He made his first carving as a pupil at the Polish Seminary School, 5 Rue des Irlandais, Paris from 1963 to 1970.

He witnessed the student rioters burning cars outside the school in the student riots in Paris in 1968, and remembers playing volleyball with Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow, the later Pope John Paul II who was a frequent visitor to the Seminary.

The building is now the Irish Cultural Centre and was previously the Irish College in Paris.

As a young man in the 1970s, he endured lengthy coach rides and the privations of communist Poland to rebuild the bond with his greater family.

As his knowledge of that country grew, so did his realisation that he was shaped more deeply by his past: a sculpting contemporary of Anthony Gormley at London's prestigious Slade School of Art, Koenig suffered for his instinctive – and unfashionable – decision to work in wood, a form which he was now to appreciate as a distinctly Polish tradition.

He graduated from Brighton Polytechnic with First Class Honours in Fine Art in 1976.

The Grizedale Forest Sculpture Project was initiated in 1977 and has influenced a generation of sculptors and helped transform the way sculpture is seen and made and understood in public places.

His ongoing monumental woodcarving project 'Odyssey' seeks out temporary exhibition spaces in cathedrals, street corners, town squares, barns and fields in Poland, Ukraine and currently the UK.

The UK venues include Rochester Cathedral, Portsmouth Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral and York Minster.

Odyssey consists of an ever expanding group of carved wood male and female figures, each 2.5m tall.

In 1978 he obtained a Higher Diploma of Postgraduate Sculpture at the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, London; he was a contemporary of Antony Gormley, as both studied in the Slade Sculpture Department at the same time 1977 to 1978.

He won the Boise Travel Bursary in 1978, and in 1983 a scholarship to the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, Poland.

He is noted for his imaginative and bold use of colour on wood, which started during his Slade student days.

He produces woodcarvings both large and small for public and private spaces around the UK.

He is known for his carved and polychromed figurative wood sculptures, which he has been creating since the early 1980s.

He spent seven months during 1982–83 living and working in a forest environment and left behind six sculptures as his personal response to this landscape.

One of the earliest polychromed figures was shown in the 'Temple' exhibition at the Shaw Theatre, London in 1988.

'Metropolis', a 34 ft oak column, was sited in Campbell Park in Central Milton Keynes in 1991.

In 1992 the artist Craigie Horsfield wrote: "Koenig drew from the culture of carving that was rooted in the folk art of Central Europe; a naturalist depiction of the world with mythic overtones. It is no coincidence that the small renaissance of wood carving apparent in Europe should have happened in Germany; in our century the focus of the long struggle of nationalism and mystery. It was given impetus and found acceptance through the painted wood sculpture of Georg Baselitz. In the line of Kirchner's expressionist figures the wood is scarred and the heads, excessive and gestural, have pigment dragged across them. They came out of the expressionist tradition but made space effectively for other artists to be seen. The most visible of these has been Stefan Balkenhol, an artist making naturalistic painted figures acknowledging a tradition of Central European village carving.

It is against this background that Robert Koenig works." (from the catalogue "Robert Koenig sculpture")

Koenig was born in Manchester of Polish immigrants.

Since 1996 Robert Koenig has collaborated closely with the Museum Dwory Karwacjanow and Gladyszow in the town of Gorlice in South East Poland.

'Bilston Totems' is a group of 15 carved sweet chestnut trees up to 19 ft in height and sited on the Oxford Road roundabout in Bilston, Wolverhampton in 1997.

A 14ft cedar woodcarving entitled ‘Boy and Girl’ was sited on a roundabout in Kents Hill, Milton Keynes in 1997.

He regularly works on large scale carved and painted wood relief panels such as the 'Blue Portal no. 7' purchased by the Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury in 1997 and the smaller 'Rustic Umbrellas' purchased by the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Robert Koenig was one of the first artists to be invited to participate in the Grizedale Forest Sculpture Project in the Lake District of England.

He has held exhibitions there in 1997, 2001 and 2004 and in the nearby town of Tarnow in 1998 and 2004.

He is a regular Polish English translator of their art catalogues and associated texts and information boards.

He is also helping to set up art workshops and symposiums for UK participants at the newly restored Renaissance castle of Szymbark.

Work in public and private collections in United Kingdom, USA, France, Italy, Malta, Sweden, Germany, Greece, China and Poland.

Most of us, to some extent, remember the stories we were told as children – fragments of fictional tales designed to engender good behaviour, or simply fuel our imaginations.

For Robert Koenig, growing up in the suburbs of Manchester, the stories were all too real – rich tales of his mother's childhood in south-east Poland, full of community and characters, superseded as he grew older by the altogether darker narrative of her wartime removal to Germany, the hell of the labour camps and her eventual arrival in the UK.

For Koenig, the stories stuck, creating a desire to learn more, to see the country of his ancestors and to come to terms with his family history.

As he matured, Koenig sought his defining project and so in 1997 began carving a series of greater-than-life-size figures, initially called "Dziady", the Polish name of a ceremony celebrating the memory of deceased ancestors, but since renamed "Odyssey" for what has become an international audience.

A mass of figures to represent the ancestors he never met, they are "monumental", although rather than crying out for attention, they appeal to the viewer on a more intimate, empathetic level, often inspiring strong emotions from those who come into contact with them.

A film of Robert Koenig's tour to the Ukraine – Dziady: In Search of Jan Dudek – will be released soon.

These polychromed figures were exhibited in Leutkirch im Allgäu, Baden-Württemberg, Germany in 2013.

There are a further 5 Odyssey figures which were created for each of the five exhibition venues in Germany between 2013-17.

As of 2019 there are 46 figures in the Odyssey touring group.