BEHIND THE ENGINEERING // JAKOB GROSSE-OPHOFF
Engineered Art
A German artist uses his engineering skills to recreate human movement.
Written by Michael Abrams
All art and videos courtesy of Jakob Grosse-Ophoff
SAY WHAT YOU WANT about the sense of motion in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or Rodin’s The Walking Man, the fact of the matter is that those sculptures don’t move. That’s because sculptures (mostly) don’t move. The characters featured in the works of Bernini and Rodin, and most of the statuary you might see in a museum, are frozen in time, mere three-dimensional versions of the still images found hanging on the walls.
Maybe that has something to do with the fact that neither Rodin nor Bernini had a degree in engineering.
Jakob Grosse-Ophoff does. And the works produced by the engineer-cum-artist capture or reenact human gestures with great grace, precision, wit, and, yes, movement. His figures breathe, smoke, apply makeup, pick their nose, saw their own leg, pour wine, blow bubbles, smack their head against a mirror, and hug their viewers, to name just a few of the human activities Grosse-Ophoff depicts with his art—and his engineering.
Art, Engineering, and Back Again
Both the artist and the engineer were seemingly in him from the beginning.
“I had the opportunity to use my dad’s workshop from an early age—there are pictures of me working with wood when I was six—and I think that shaped my carving and building skills a lot,” Grosse-Ophoff said. “My mom likes to do craft things as well, so I was born and raised to be creative.”
He continued drawing and working in the workshop all through high school. And yet it never crossed his mind that becoming an artist was a possibility for him, to say nothing of a career. Instead, he went to the University of Rostock and earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 2019, with a focus on renewable energies and composite materials.
“I worked with a lot of fiberglass and carbon and stuff like that. But at one point I realized it was so toxic. I was getting itchy and I thought, ‘I know I don’t want to touch fiberglass or epoxy resin again,’” Grosse-Ophoff recalled.
During one engineering internship, he was put to work welding a sculpture when the head of internships suggested that maybe he should be an artist. “At that point, I still didn’t think about it as a possibility, so I finished my engineering degree. But right after, I decided to be self-employed and publish art,” he said.
He began with art of the two-dimensional sort, largely because producing it required no shop and cost almost nothing in terms of investment. Despite a resistance to social media, he started an Instagram account and began posting photos of his drawings.
“I’ve heard that everybody who does things on the internet has people saying bad things about them, and I don’t have that at all,” Grosse-Ophoff said. “I find it so crazy that nobody’s getting angry.”
Indeed, his posts drew the opposite reaction, and he soon found that he could support himself on his art. He did, however, spend some time building tree houses in New Zealand, “because at that point I thought I might become a tree house builder for living,” he said. Grosse-Ophoff also spent a year and a half building a bar for a friend’s business in his hometown.
But even a cursory look at those 2D illustrations reveals a man obsessed with machines. Gears, power transmission, and power sources dominate. After selling apparatus-filled drawings at exhibitions for several years, it occurred to him that maybe they could step out of the flatlands.
“I thought, ‘Why not show these sculptures that have been stuck in my head for such a long time?’” he said. “The first sculptures I made were actually quite intense and important for me.”
Movement Harnessed
His first 3D piece—also his first kinetic piece—was called “The Tireless Dancer.” It features a wooden head with an arm on either side. Each arm is divided into four segments and each segment can rise and fall thanks to the bars that connect them vertically to a turning twisted axle below. Thanks to this arrangement, the arms move in what a breakdancer would call an arm wave. And it is instantly recognizable human movement, made more striking by the simplicity with which it is executed.
“That is a quite an important sculpture for me, because it shows engineering skills, but also the beauty of life, of human beings, of dancing,” he added.
But it wasn’t only the beauty of humans in action that interested Grosse-Ophoff, but the very humanness of human action. And that includes the rawer emotions. So, his second work was a study in a gesture of frustration and is called “Self-reflection.” A wooden torso faces a mirror; the head it supports lifts slowly from a downward angle until it is parallel with the mirror. Then it slams forward till the forehead bangs against the glass. And then, after a moment, it repeats the gesture again, and again, and again.
“It’s a big wooden sculpture, and he’s slamming his head against the mirror, which is not about the beauty of life, but about the pain and struggle of life,” Grosse-Ophoff said. The head slamming is controlled by a simple comma shaped wheel that pushes a bar slowly and releases it suddenly to create the head-pounding effect. “I love to think about the simplest technical way to show a human movement,” he continued.
That piece is currently on Broadway—as part of an exhibit of automatons that theatergoers pass on their way to their seats for the show Masquerade—bashing its head repeatedly for all to see. “When I designed the sculpture, I thought it would break the mirror on the first hit,” Grosse-Ophoff said. “But it still hasn’t broken.”
There are two human emotions, or behaviors, which seem to occupy him more than others. One is loneliness. His moving oeuvre includes an applause machine, a machine that blows the viewer a kiss, and one that claps the willing participant on the shoulder: all meant to offer brief moments of confidence to the lonely.
One sculpture appears, at first glance, to be two arms extended, motionless, against a wall. But upon approaching it closely and leaning between the arms, art consumers will find themselves in a full, very human-like embrace.
“I get a lot of very nice but also very lonely messages, of people telling me about their loneliness,” Grosse-Ophoff said. “It’s very touching and reflects the time we are living in. There are a lot of lonely people out there.”
The other human tendency that interests him is self-destruction, on scales both large and small. One machine is a simple beam sticking out of a wall.
On it is a contraption that sends a saw back and forth on the beam—but the saw is on the wrong side of the contraption, closer to the wall.
Once it gets through the beam, saw, machine, and beam will come crashing down, like cartoon characters that saw the tree branches they’re sitting on. The catastrophe will happen eventually, but not before many viewers have had a chance to enjoy it.
“It has a weight that lets it saw very slowly and it’s not the sharpest saw,” Grosse-Ophoff explained. “But it does saw. When it’s at an exhibition, you see sawdust right next to the cut and also on the floor.”
Similarly, the sculpture titled “Humanity” features a sawing machine sitting atop a human leg, only the saw blade that does the sawing is between foot and machine, making the work necessarily a temporary exhibit. “Still Standing” features another leg sporting an apparatus at its top. In that case, a slightly more elaborate setup turns another comma-shaped wheel to raise and drop an axe against the leg’s calf.
“Holy hell, this is incredible, man. You make me want to learn how to engineer,” commented Ian Fichman, another sculptor, on Instagram.
A less allegorical self-destructive sculpture, called “You Will Never Smoke Alone Again,” can smoke an actual cigarette. The gears of this piece sit below a wooden mouth and nose and drive a piston up and down to operate a vacuum. Thus, the facial features are able to breathe in and out. This respiratory system is synced to a hand, with middle and forefingers extended to hold a cigarette, which swings to and from the mouth so that each puff is carefully timed. The whole movement is shockingly human.
“Smoking, as a human, makes no sense, because it’s not healthy. But it also doesn’t make sense to build a machine that smokes, so it’s kind of the same,” Grosse-Ophoff said. “But the aesthetic of the hand and the smoke—it’s just beautiful. I think smoking is so human.”
Artful Impact
But whatever reverberations—aesthetic, cultural, political, or psychological—that these pieces evoke in the artgoer, there is one that has proven to be far and above the most popular. “The Finger” is one of the simpler of Grosse-Ophoff’s kinetic sculptures and requires no electricity. A wooden fist, with a crank extending from its side, sits on a pedestal. When the crank is turned, the middle finger is raised until the fist has become the offensive gesture known as “the bird.” So far, Grosse-Ophoff has sold 77 of this piece.
The plain humanity of these sculptures mixed with their mechanical simplicity makes them accessible to a wide audience.
“Children really enjoy the art, old people, young people, people that are not into art exhibitions at all, and people that have knowledge about art. I feel like everybody can relate to it somehow,” Grosse-Ophoff said.
He’s now successful enough that he has started farming out some of the work. He sends his ideas to an engineering company that does some of the carving with CNC machines, then he adds the details and refines the carvings himself.
There are many more works on the way.
“I have more ideas than I can ever build. I have a list and sketchbooks and they are full. And there are some quite complicated things,” he said. “I have a few works I’m planning where I’ll use little computers, like Raspberry Pi, to automatically play with the rotation, and some small sensors and stuff like that.”
And some of his works go beyond human gestures, to human responses to gestures. For instance, a recent piece yet to see exhibit walls is simply a short dog-tail wagging. It’s called, “Happy to See You.” Another features two chickens facing off. “When you turn it on, they scream at each other,” he said.
Viewers at a Grosse-Ophoff exhibit might do well to watch how they behave. After making his gesture machines for years now, he has a keen eye for human activity.
“This is my job now, so when I walk through life and I see things, I look differently at them today,” he said. “Because I think, ‘Oh, could this be something?’ Or when there’s a person dancing or doing any kind of gesture, I think, ‘That might be beautiful.’”
Michael Abrams is a technology writer in Westfield, N.J.
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