Almuth Tebbenhoff

b.1949

Almuth Tebbenhoff is inspired by process and particularly enjoys the way objects of beauty and intrigue can emerge from a noisy session of cutting and welding steel, or from a quieter but no less messy afternoon pushing and pummeling wet clay.

She was born in Fürstenau in north-west Germany and in 1969, a year after completing her secondary schooling, she moved to England where she studied ceramics at the Sir John Cass School of Art from 1972 to 1975. Following that, she set up a studio in London and for the next six years made studio ceramics while she developed her ideas for sculpture.

In 1981, Almuth established her Southfields studio in a former church hall. At first she worked in clay and wood, but in 1986 she started a two-year course in metal fabrication at South Thames College, London. Her early pieces were monochrome - mostly grey - abstract explorations of space and volume through geometric devices. Since the early nineties, Tebbenhoff has been moving towards a freer mode of expression, creating explosive forms in bright colours through a steady evolution of processes, investigating her current themes of light, space and the origins of matter. Recently, after receiving the Fondazione Sem Scholarship, Tebbenhoff has been exploring with working with marble in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Tebbenhoff is a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors and has exhibited widely in Britain and Germany since 1981, and she has also shown in Moscow, New York and Poznan, Poland.