Balkenhol was born in 1957 in Fritzlar, Hesse, Germany, and studied art at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts (197682). He became known for its Minimalist and Conceptualist artwork, but his early sculptures consisted of single male or female nudes attached to pedestals, echoing the tradition of classical Egyptian, Roman, and Greek statues.

From the mid-1980s to the present, Balkenhol continued to depict the human figure, but now as ordinary looking men or women in simple clothing. In addition, during the early 1990s, he began to make animal figures alone or in combination with humans, as well as their hybrids.

Balkenhol's sculptures of commonplace people are not narrative in any explicit way, but are rather suggestive of a certain story, which, with its recognizable characters or situations, seems at once familiar and strange. To put it in Balkenhol's own words: "I'm perhaps proposing a story and not telling the end, just giving a beginning or fragment. There is still a lot for the spectator to complete..."

Balkenhol lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Meisenthal, France. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. (1995), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Saatchi Collection in London (1996), and the Arts Club of Chicago (1998), among many other museums and galleries.

A traveling exhibition of his work in 2000 was organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, in collaboration with the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, Missouri.

Source:
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/David_Winton_Bell_Gallery/balkenhol.html

Balkenhol is one of the more important and popular sculptors of the present, 1976-1982. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg with Ulrich Rückriem, then he was a teacher at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, since 1992.

Blakenhol is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany. The human being is at the center of his work; roughly worked and colorfully painted wooden sculptures are characteristic of his work:

Of his work he says: "My sculptures do not tell stories. Something mysterious is hidden in them. It is not my task to reveal it, but that of the viewer to discover it '(citation Balkenhol).

The German artist Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) is one of the most famous exponents of the contemporary figurative sculpture. From 1976 to 1982 he studied under the tutelage of Ulrich Rückriem at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. A Karl Schmidt-Rotluff scholarship enabled him to specialize in sculpture.

He then worked as a teacher at the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt. Since 1992, he has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. Works by Balkenhol are on display in several major museums, such as the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main and at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.