Bernd C. Dietrich

Just like the founders of the ZERO movement, the works by Bernd Caspar Dietrich, born in 1957 in Eilenburg, Saxony, are influenced by light and shadow. His works focus on the materials sand and glass. By transforming them with water and pigment, he creates impressive objects in the tradition of the great Zero artists Heinz Mack, Adolf Luther and Christian Megert. Bernd Casper Dietrich is with his light-kinetic works a second-generation Zero artist.

“Liquid sculptures”: glass objects and mirror cubes in public spaces

From 2000 to 2002, Bernd Caspar Dietrich was a professor at the Alberta College of Art & Design (ACAD) at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Since his return to Germany in 2002, Bernd Casper Dietrich has been increasingly concerned with the transformation of sand into sculptural forms. The result of this development is the concept of “liquid sculpture.” Because glass is not solid in the usual sense, it behaves differently than metals or crystals, as it is only apparently solid. This approach results in spectacular geometrically shaped mirror cubes: Bernd Caspar Dietrich’s unique “energy collector”.

The work series “Wheels” – concentric narratives

In 2013, Bernd C. Dietrich created his first “Wheel”, inspired by his encounter with Christo in Oberhausen and a visit to his Big Air Package project. The series of Wheels, which has continued ever since, comprises almost 100 works to date, making it perhaps his most important work series. Here too, the artist uses sand as the basis, which he works on using old fresco techniques to explore the geometric form of the circle.

Each wheel is a concentric, circular narrative. The respective personal or often socio-critical narrative story determines how fragile, cracked, broken or delicate the surface of the canvas is. How dominantly the background and foreground interact with each other. How luminescently they “breathe” in the darkness. Sometimes they are so called “metamorphoses”, i.e. works that have already been exhibited and which the artist brute-force reworks, for example with a beer barrel hammer. The upper crust is left behind as a geological cut, like a tectonic search for traces.
The work series “BetonGold” and “The Urbanists” – aesthetic social criticism made of concrete

In other works series, such as “BetonGold” and “Die Urbanisten”, the material, the surfaces and the resulting structures, as well as the included stories, are also elementary.

In the BetonGold series, first published in 2021, the artist juxtaposes the rough concrete with the precious material gold. With these works, Dietrich opens up the discourse on social responsibility with regard to housing construction, urbanization and the scarcity of raw materials. In the Urbanists cycle of works, the artist goes one step further and addresses the downfall of societies through wars caused by the hegemonic territorial claims of individual agitators.

International success and auction at Christie’s auction house

Bernd C. Dietrich’s worldwide success is marked by the recent auction of the works Metamorphosis Magelone III (2023) and Opal (2024) by the renowned auction house Christie’s, where the estimated prices got more than doubled. Further international auctions are already being planned.

Works by Bernd Caspar Dietrich, who is also the initiator of the “Kunstkompakt Festival Virtuell-Visuell” and aRTPARK festivals, can be found in renowned private and institutional collections.