Rinsberg – Aprons and carving tools are accessories that have become almost a second skin for artist Tony Torilhon. And when he leaves his gallery and workshop in Rheinsberg in northern Brandenburg, one is almost always looking for material in the woods on the Grinericsee. Tony Torilhon does not see, he finds. Branches, boards, stumps – nothing remains from his trained eye that cannot be processed further.

The wooden giraffe in front of his gallery on Schlossstrasse is an important example of artistic penetration of the surrounding nature. A massive branch, which he has given the character of a giraffe leaning mainly through the color scheme. And there is a miniature version of the giraffe sculpture in the work itself for better understanding.

Toni Torilhon is a situationist wooden sculptor, over the years he has created a small sculpture park with figures from the Odyssey in the boulevard at the port of Rheinsberg and integrates the occasional feud with the local shipowner, who has the next At the door are her excursion boats, of art at work. Like his recently-deceased Berlin colleague Ben Wagin, Tony Torilhohn is also an artist of perseverance, often stubbornly struggling to present his works in public space and is even ready to do so.

Peter Bruegel the Elder and the Disease

Born in 1931 in Melun, France, his path initially led him to medicine, he completed his military service as a field doctor in Algeria between 1958 and 1960. But already in his dissertation, which he completed at the Sorbonne in Paris, his artistic inclinations dominated. He did his doctorate with Peter Bruegel the Elder with a thesis on pathology, in which he proved that his depictions of people were not the painter’s grotesque exaggerations, but accurate images of contemporary clinical portraits. With this discovery, Torilhon temporarily became a media star, with newspaper reports appearing in the American Time magazine, in Le Monde and in the Hamburg magazine Der Spiegel.

In the mid-1960s, Toni Torilhohn moved to Berlin to attend the Académie der Kunste, and after a brief return to France, he settled permanently in Berlin from the late 1970s. In addition to wood carvings, at the heart of his artistic work is an extensive graphic work, which he sells freely in his Rheinsberg domicile, which he expanded with his second wife, who unfortunately died in 1999 in 2005. Went. Toni Torilhohn, celebrating his 90th birthday with friends today, has become a German citizen at the age of 82. But deep down in his heart he sees himself primarily as a Rinsburger.