THE OEUVRE

Art & Archive

The FINKE ESTATE holds the principal body of Dieter Finke's work, spanning more than five decades of practice. This collection comprises sculptures, several hundred objects, and approximately 2,000 paintings and drawings, ranging from napkin-sized sketches to space-defining works.

These Holdings represent the works Finke retained rather than released into circulation. Across his career as working artist, he supported himself through his work, and a considerable part of Finke's work passed into private or public hands over the course of his life. A significant share of his practice, including material within the Estate's own holdings, has never been publicly exhibited or made known.

Alongside this collection, the Estate maintains an extensive Documentary Archive of photographic material, sketchbooks, film, process documentation, and ephemera. It is through this archive — and ongoing research — that works and connections once thought lost are identified and reattached to the Oeuvre.

Together, Finke's Works and their Documentary Record read not as a single line of development, but as a non linear process revolving around a distinct set of subject's and investigative methods.

ORIGINAL WORKS

The Art

Across Finke's practice, five principal forms recur:

Sculpture — spans the full arc of the practice: early plaster and wire figures from the Sintenis years, stone and wood constructions from the tectonic reduction phase, and the bronze animals and guardian figures cast at Hermann Noack's foundry from 1988. Bronze is a later, select part of this body — not its whole.

Paintings — large-format works on plywood, canvas, and sailcloth: the Haubachstrasse plywood paintings (1988–91), identified as the definitive statement of Finke's painting practice; sailcloth works from the New York period (1974–77); early canvas paintings from Berlin.

Works on paper — large-scale drawings in ink, oil crayon, and chalk on packing paper, sailcloth, and cardboard, developed in New York and Berlin, 1974–82, including the Raum-Licht-Zeichnungen first shown in 1976. Together with the paintings, these make up the bulk of the surviving archive.

Plexiglas works — spatial constructions in acrylic glass, painted film, and layered geometry, Berlin 1966–73 — the rupture into abstraction that established the spatial and relational logic carried through the later work.

Objects, installations, and stage works — three-dimensional and site-specific works in plywood, photography, and mixed media, including temporary installations and stage collaborations in New York and Berlin.

DOCUMENTARY RECORD

The Archive

The Documentary Record of the Finke Estate encompasses installation views, studio photographs, exhibition material, process and archival documents spanning Finke’s complete body of work. Digitized from 35 mm slides, professional large-format Ektachrome transparencies, negatives, prints and sketchbooks — this material is the primary research instrument of the Estate.

As the Estate's digitized record grows — alongside published catalogues and works that surface from outside the Estate — individual pieces are identified, researched, and formally classified once their positioning within the Oeuvre is stabilised.

This is the beginning of the Estate's Catalogue Raisonné: the record from which the full account of Dieter Finke's work will be reconstructed and built.

RESEARCH AND ARCHIVE

Access

For research access, loans, and exhibition enquiries across the Estate's holdings, contact the Estate directly.

 CONTACT