Metzel's career took off with the provocative 1987 sculpture "April 13, 1981" . This piece was his contribution to the "Sculpture Boulevard" exhibition organized as part of the celebration of Berlin's 750th birthday. It consisted of an enormous, desolate tower of what appeared to be metal police barricades, into which a shopping cart was set. In fact the work was composed not of actual found materials but of specially cast replicas of real objects that Metzel had simplified and enlarged. These pieces were piled up in a pattern that distantly recalled Tatlin's famous model for a Monument to the Third International.

On April 12 of that year, left-wing radicals, reacting to a right-wing tabloid's report of the death of an imprisoned member of the Baader-Meinhof group, had smashed hundreds of windows on the Kurfurstendamm, the city's busiest consumer boulevard, and fought with police. Metzel was struck by the ridiculousness of the pitched battle, in which both sides rushed unthinkingly into action: the media report that triggered the demonstration turned out to be false, and the police barricades were brought in too late to have the slightest effect. By choosing as his title the date of the next day, he ironically highlighted the clean-up operation that had removed the debris left over from this violent exercise in futility.

Although his sculptures and installations have been described as political art, they can seem, on first encounter, quite opaque. Metzel is not a "politically conscious" artist in the old sense; his art makes no direct political appeal to its audience. Also does he have little interest in indictments of specific institutions. Instead, taking for granted the unpredictable libido of the mass public, Metzel searches for its motivating forces, freezing its material signs in works that make manifest some of the violent absurdities of today's social life.

Metzel's work has remained too independent and unpredictable to attract imitators.

(taken from:) http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v85/ai_19488680
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_41/ai_91202165

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Grants and other awards