Biography

Raymond LOHR was born in 1955 in Luxembourg.

Already as a child he was not satisfied with building simple sand castles on the beach, but tried to build mountainous landscapes crossed by winding roads, and sculpted ephemeral shapes which would soon be washed away by waves. Life forced him to choose a profession at a young age, and so Raymond Lohr chose carpentry, which gave him the opportunity to work three-dimensionally.

In the 70’s Raymond Lohr leaped at the opportunity when Josy Jungblut offered courses in woodcarving. Ever since that time he has continued to progress in his self-made career. Multiple training courses followed in Luxembourg and abroad, and at the same time he obtained a Master’s Certificate in carpentry. In order to further improve his teaching skills as well as the plastic arts, he enrolled at the Mannheim Teacher Training College.

After returning to his native country and a lot of thinking, Raymond Lohr started his long dialogue with stone, his laborious fight against matter which forcibly resists him, and simultaneously started his teaching career. If his art abandoned wood, which unique character one must respect, it was to better impress his personal mark on stone in a harsh confrontation which demands physical force as well as strength of character, in order to face the challenge presented by the hardness of the matter.

A next stage led the artist to Italy where he trained in sculpting. His teacher was the then sculptor Pierre Wéber who did the copy of the Lascaux caves. Subsequently, he worked with the Milanese Cesare Riva at Pietrasanta, the meeting point for sculptors from all over the world who go there to work stone and marble.

Raymond Lohr returned there for many years to tackle the stone until he found a carpenter’s shop in Helmsange, Luxembourg, where he set up his sculpture workshop, and opened it in July 2000.

Ray L, as his artist’s name indicates, is not too keen on artificial effects. He wants to shape the stone by fixing reality into it first and foremost, in order to better develop his own language and to allow more interaction with the viewer.

Marble immediately evokes shining and smooth surfaces, impeccable from an esthetical viewpoint. Raymond Lohr goes much further by opposing porous surfaces, sometimes covered over with folds like pleated cloth, or granular surfaces, which give life to the crystalline internal structure of the stone. To counterbalance curves and sensuous cavities, which slightly remind us of the human body, he erects steles with marked and bright edges. The notches, the folds, the cavities, the introverted exterior only accentuate the duality and the bipolarity of these sculptures in which negative contrasts with positive, vertical lines alternate with horizontal ones, figurative and symbolic reminiscences interact with narrative elements, sculptures in which reality sometimes yields to abstract art, in which shadow fights with light in an attempt to penetrate inside or is reflected on the polished surfaces. But sometimes, the artist also tackles more daring structures, where diagonals surge to conquer space, thus rendering illusive all the laws of equilibrium.

Questioning matter, listening to the world, combining reality and the symbolical in modern language, while adding narrative and anecdotal elements to geometric shapes, that’s Raymond Lohr’s quest. Ray L thinks that the culture of marble, too often associated with funeral monuments and architectural elements aimed at embellishing palaces and cathedrals, does not yet exist. Therefore it must be achieved.