With his sculptures, the artist Malte Bruns transfers corporeality into a grotesque-technoid structure and at the same time deprives them of identity and gender. Although he partly takes his own body as a model for the limbs that clearly appear to be of human origin, the figures do not appear to be of this world.
"For the artist, his own body is 'first material,' it is always available, virtually challenging defiguration, fragmentation, and concealment. Dissolution and re-creation are significant elements in the works of the Surrealists, for example. Consider how scenes from An Andalusian Dog (1929) horrified audiences. Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés, Hans Bellmer's Puppen des Bösen (Dolls of Evil) and Cindy Sherman's paintings inspired by them - Malte Bruns places himself in the tradition of artists and literary figures who have been attracted for centuries by the artificiality of the "Menschlein" (Latin homunculus "little man", diminutive form of Latin homo "man"), starting with Adam, as the first religious artificial man, through E. T.A. Hoffmann's Olimpia in The Sandman, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and more." (Gertrud Peters)
