1952–present
Dao Droste
Dao Droste was born in 1952 in Saigon, moved to Germany in 1971 and first trained as a chemist, earning a doctorate. She works as a sculptor, painter and installation artist and opened her own studio in 1987. She is known for an installation of five hundred terracotta faces and for the statuette made for the One World Award.
Biography
There are five hundred faces in this installation, and all of them are made of fired clay. The work is called “Open-mindedness” and brought Dao Droste international attention.
She was born in 1952 in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. In 1971, at the age of nineteen, she moved to Germany. She did not come to art at once. She first studied chemistry in Stuttgart and Heidelberg and took a doctorate. Then she turned to sculpture: according to some accounts, she trained in a ceramics workshop. Later she began to work in painting and installation. In 1987 she opened her own studio in Eppelheim (according to other accounts, her gallery opened there). She still lives in the same town. The artist describes herself as a follower of Taoism, and the main theme of her work is connected with this: human beings in harmony with nature. She also names the Eastern idea of yin and yang as a source of her ideas. It seems to me that terracotta is no accident here: clay, fire and firing remain the most direct material for speaking about the earth and about people, although the artist herself, as far as is known, has not explained her choice in this way.
Droste made the statuette for the One World Award, which was established by Rapunzel Naturkost, a producer of organic food, and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). In 2015 she herself received the environmental prize of the German Working Group for Environmental Management (BAUM).
Her works are held in public and private collections: the Carl Bosch Museum in Heidelberg, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Berlin and the collection of the city of Eppelheim.
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