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Tilmann Krumrey (b. 1966 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany) comes from a family of artistic personalities and has a strong bauhaus heritage through his father Immo Krumrey (studied at hfg ulm with Albers, Itten, et a. and worked for Max Bill). First artistic impulses are set in the studio of the professional sculptor Doris von Sengbusch-Eckardt, a sister of his grandmother, whilst 7 years of age. The encounter with oil-painting at 12 in the studio of her son-in-law, Prof. Albert Fessler a friend of Dalí, etches ineradicable traces of scent, color and phantasmic gesture into his memory. Later, in his early twenties, sculptor and silversmith Prof. Hartwig Ullrich, also a breed of bauhaus graduate Wolfgang Tümpel, becomes his mentor and transfers the radical ethos of bauhaus another time from a different angle.
Krumrey starts studying History of Art and impresses his professors with brilliance, but switches half way to Economics, because he is driven by the deep wish of altering our in-human post-capitalist, war-driven, nature-exploiting structure of society and expects therefore the tools in finance and in business.
He receives in 1995 MBA (Dipl.Kfm.) and goes for a memorable journey through Greece, spotting ancient marble quarries on Paros Island with undiscovered half-finished antique sculptures or hardly approachable temple sites on Naxos Island, ready for restoration. He is fascinated by the freshly cut marble blocks with light transcending through their edges, lying in the sun surrounded by white crystalline shimmer. Those impressions produce a final turning point from his modernist youth, which in fact already started in 1990, when Krumrey turned his interest towards natural figuration in the first place, very much to the dislike of his mentors. After the Greek experience Krumrey embarks on an intensive dialogue with classical figure and makes the human form subject of his creative adventure.
Opening his first artist studio in Lower Bavaria near Passau, Krumrey works simultaneously in marketing for Microsoft (setting up the very first web presence of Microsoft CRCU, works in channel marketing, manages Microsoft Home Journal) and works thereafter as highly paid copywriter for a leading advertising agency. He eventually starts-up with a partner one of the first internet consulting companies in Germany. As creative head of the company, Krumrey becomes pioneer in SEO (search engine optimization). He acquires key industry clients due to an innovative server based programming approach and gets companies like Neckermann, Hamburg-Mannheimer and later-on Schering, Ebay etc. on board.
During this period Krumrey gets in touch with venture capital and thoughtfully changes direction from internet consulting into venture capital consulting and financial advisory, still memorizing his old dream of altering society by altering decisions in finance, the intention that originally led him into economics. The company of two associates and 10 to 15 employees quickly grows into 7-digit figures, with clients from tech start-ups to Nasdaq listed companies, and rents a prestigious 500 sqm office opposite the National Opera House in Munich. It is the late nineties with rallying new tech stock markets, greedy investors, millions of start-ups, and Munich getting the leading place for venture capital in Germany. Even an old Hamburg private bank asks to acquire the Munich based consultancy to buy into the steady deal flow.
Despite all this “success”, Krumrey grows an increasing inner tension and loses track of his art. Then in 2001 9-11 happens, the stock market breaks down and economic struggle begins. Turmoil is everywhere and the inner and outer tension lead to rupture within his former path in life: trouble with his associate at the company, with employees, with clients. Krumrey optimistically takes over the company as a whole and finds himself soon thereafter, at the age of 35, almost buried in a field of rubble and debt that takes him years to dig away.
He slowly realizes that change in society can only be achieved by change in consciousness. Change “within finance” created a failure, so another “from within” is needed. First of January 2006, at a New Years brunch invitation, he meets several other artists – a wonderful jazz singer, her husband, a trumpet player and, the third – most importantly – a genius architect and urbanist. This contact inspires the glow of his own artistic flame and all of a sudden it becomes clear: For the sake of his mission, he needs to go back at work into his studio in Lower Bavaria. It is a must – not a choice. This time wholly dedicated, full time and with the objective to change society from “within consciousness” through the power of art.
Through researching existential philosophical topics, Krumrey becomes familiar with Campbell’s archetypal Monomyth model. His investigation of ‘the hero’s journey’ yields numerous artworks and provides the impetus for the Monomyth series. He profoundly understands forms of physicality in sculpture and the order of space from its Egyptian origins to classical Hellenist sculpture as much as the works of Michelangelo to Rodin and back to Giacometti, that existentialist sculptor of the nineteen-sixties, who regarded himself as an Egyptian artist.
In 2010 the mirror-image multiplication of Cain and Abel (BROTHERS) gets finally realized. It may be considered a true innovation in the field of statuary figurative sculpture. It is at that time in February 2010, while working on BROTHERS, when his younger brother, an experienced ski mountaineer, all of a sudden dies in an avalanche in Austria.
Krumrey understands that built space (architecture) and body (corpus or sculpture) are complementary, like hand and glove i.e. The interaction of space and body unfolds spontaneously, is always unconsciously present and influences emotional condition and feeling. Therefore he builds immersive „theatre stages“ for his sculptures, where all senses – by acoustics, light, temperature, smell, touch etc – are addressed as a total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk (Monomyth Block l and ll). These spaces change consciousness and build bridges between the inner worlds of dreams and physical existence by reflecting the states of the soul. Body language, the expression of figure and facial expression, is, alongside music and perhaps mathematics, the universal language of all people. This „ability to switch“ between the inner world of the soul and the outer world of reality is seen in psychology as a prerequisite for mental and psychological health, both for the individual and for society as a whole (Arno Gruen). Equal to what the dream is for the individual, the collective dream, the myth, is thus for society (Joseph Campbell).
From there Krumrey moves to video: for conserving the spaces built, for transferring those into another medium (film) – especially important in times of social media – and for telling the story contained within each sculpture in form of a movie plot, as the audience of today is rarely capable of deciphering the “frozen dramaturgy” within the innervation and expression of a figurative sculpture into the narrative of a tale.
In his sculpture, he uses classic materials – stone, wood, plaster, wax, clay, bronze – in order to strengthen innovation of form rather than material innovation, as popular in contemporary art. Despite that being said, he always stays open to try out new materials (such as fiber-resins), technical solutions (such as 3D sculpting software) or processes (such as 3D printing or developing a casting process for fine silver) and embraces them, whenever beneficial for his artistic intentions.
Yet, a bauhaus heir, his artistic approach is methodically systematic and strictly structured: standing, lying, sitting, hanging, jumping, running, resting etc. are fundamental human body actions that are examined in their expressiveness. Turning, separating, merging, mirroring, combining, sharpening, dissolving, cutting etc. are artistic permutations of body that are applied to the individual postures. In doing so, a two-dimensional morphological matrix can be derived from both categories (body state / creative permutation). The resulting fields of the two morphological coordinates represent all creative manifestations of these two categories and thus enable the artist to systematically grasp the artistic possibilities for his work.
In 2017 Krumrey builds a new studio in Greece for getting even closer to the crystalline power of the magic Greek Marble. Forced by the rupture of continuity in 2020 he moves back to Munich and loses his studio in Athens. The old passion for painting, rarely executed over the past 3 decades but always present, solves his studio loss. He accomplishes within 3 years more than 20 paintings under provisory circumstances, developing old master techniques, researching oil-painting methods from Caravaggio to Rembrandt and combines them with 19th century alla prima painting. Introducing sculptural ideas in painting, Krumrey establishes spaces beyond physical reality within the virtual space of a canvas, confronting abstract form and color as a separate quality with figuration and places figures in landscapes of dream and vision.
By 2023 a new studio place is found: 6.2 hectares of agricultural land, several 300-year-old stone houses, within a national park at the Italian Riviera, 900 m above sea level: ready for developing a new Gesamtkunstwerk of art, land and space, which he started together with friends in 2024. The invitation to participate with two sculptures at the Biennale di Venezia in the same year is a present culmination of his artistic career.
Krumrey always creates a field of vibrant energy with his work, no matter of the scale it is being executed. A large Gesamtkunstwerk in process – like in Liguria – containing landscape, garden, flowers, accommodation for visitors, artists, musicians, scientists, purity in architecture, an opera festival with theatre stage, interventions with sculptures on various mountain plateaus creates the same immersive energy as Krumreys space-installations for his exhibitions or as a single sculpture or a painting. As Contemporary Artcurator Magazine recently wrote: “His sculptures and paintings do not simply occupy space; they create space—a space for contemplation, for emotion, for existential reckoning. This capacity to evoke the spectral range of human experiences places him in the rare echelon of artists whose works are timeless yet immediate, personal yet universal.”
In this dimension his various works are not only a locally distributed phenomenon but need to be understood as creation of bridges into the future of humanity, as pathways to prosperity of planet earth by opening and holding space for ideas within the morphogenetic field of collective consciousness.