Joachim Berthold, born 1917 in Eisenach, lived and worked until his death in 1990 in Oberaudorf am Inn. In 1936 he began his training at the renow­ ned Werkschule in Cologne. There he met his artist colleague and later wife Gisela Berthold­Sames and he continued his studies until 1941 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 1945 he worked as a freelance sculptor. This was followed by hard artist years in which the execution of any commissioned work to secure a livelihood left little time for free work. Gradually, the situation improved until, from the 1960s, it gained interna­tional renown through more and more numerous and important exhibitions at home and abroad, large orders from industry and cities as well as mu­seum acquisitions.

Berthold's appearance was striking. This corresponds to his figurative, mainly in bronze realized small to larger than life­sized sculptures. The to­pic of his work was the man. He was not concerned with the representation of individual, external manifestations. His sculptures are reduced to the essentials, re­ main in their economical movements, wi­thout facial expressions, anonymous and timeless. The essence of man and his development between becoming and decay were his concerns.

Through the mental processing of Greek me­taphors, he concentrated on the depiction of the human forms involved in a matter or in their own body form and dissolving out of it, as well as cast their own shadow. Berthold's typical formal idiom lives from the antago­nism of convex and concave, perfectly smoo­thed and rough, sometimes broken surfaces, exposing the underlying innermost amor­phous layers.