In dreamlike scenes, Kalmbach’s drawings, watercolors and sculptures create impressions of social networks of relationships and reflect the difficulty of finding one’s way around them. The childhood images, mostly in warm colours, initially convey associations of innocence. Only when viewed over a longer period of time does the ambivalence of the early years of life and the complexity of human relationships become apparent. The initially delicate physicality of the figures mutates into a perception of sexuality, conflict and violence.
The five drawings for the GAK represent a development, but also function as individual, independent works: one figure each, sexually undefined, is accompanied by a haze-like arrangement that clenches over its head, envelops it, falls out of its hands or forms a mound under its feet. At second glance, face-like deformations can be seen in the clusters, so that the drawings can be read in their juxtapositions of individual and mass as different states of interpersonal relationships.