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E R Nele

Born 1932, Berlin.


Eva Renee Nele is a sculptor, designer and jeweller, the daughter of Arnold Bode, the German architect and curator who founded the Documenta Biennale exhibitions in Kassell in 1955.

She studied art in Berlin and Paris before coming to London from 1950 to 1955 to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. She then spent time at the Paris workshop of Lacourière before returning to Frankfurt in Germany where she still lives.

Nele is a prolific and versatile artist, renowned for her large-scale metal sculptures, many for public commissions, such as Die Rampe a Holocaust memorial in Frankfurt in 1980; she also made modernist Bauhaus-inspired jewellery in the post-war years when jewellery as ‘wearable art’ was in vogue. In the 1960s she designed a range of domestic lighting products and furniture which are still highly collectable.

Ever since 1960, Nele has been a frequent exhibitor principally in Germany but also in Austria, Holland and the UK and further afield in the USA, Italy and Japan. Her work was included in an exhibition of Post-War sculpture at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2010-2011. In 2011 the retrospective exhibition Yesterday and Tomorrow was held in her home city to celebrate her eightieth birthday.

Santa Barbara
Red Wood