In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Joachim Bandau (born 1936) subjected the image of humanity to a critical reformulation in his polyester sculptures. Bandau’s works articulate a concern for the future of self-determination, democracy and humanity that is at the same time typical of their time and very current. The artist created impressive caricatures of a society he saw to be unstoppably moving towards “1984”, towards the perfection of a technologically conducted oppression, manipulation and alienation of its people. The threat to man and his freedom is expressed in Bandau’s maimed, mutilated and monstrously mutated figuration. The artist particularly liked to work with mannequins, which he sawed up. An abdomen or a chest area, symmetrically unfolded and molded with fiberglass-reinforced polyester, formed many an upper border to Bandau’s sculptures. The publication appears on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nuremberg.