Klaus Rinke (b. 1939) is one of the founder of the School of Düsseldorf with Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo and Günther Uecker. He also worked with Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Very active on the international scene already in the 1960s, the artist worked alongside and across the great radical movements such as Body Art, Land Art or Conceptual Art without his work ever being reducible to a single one of these problematics. Together with a regular practice in drawing and painting, Klaus Rinke has developed a body of work as a sculptor in the broad sense of the term, using aesthetic means at the frontier of art and of science with the aim of arousing consciousness of the essential givens of experience: time, space, gravity. Using elementary structures in which water and metal preponderate, he seeks to understand the physical and material dimension of the universe and through this mark out the way towards a reflection on the metaphysical.
Among several exhibitions, Klaus Rinke was twice at Documenta Kassel, twice at the Biennale of Venice and had solo shows in some of the most important museums all over the world such as the Moma of New York, the Centre Pompidou of Paris, the Tate Modern in London, at CCCOD of Tours, the Museum Kuppersmuhle in Duisburg and Haubrok Foundation in Berlin. He now lives and works between Linz, Austria, and Los Angeles, United States.