“They are imbeciles who call my work abstract,” Brancusi said. “That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea—the essence of things.” Long before he became the patriarch of modern sculpture, Brancusi was carving wooden farm tools as a child in the village of Hobița, at the edge of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains. That early intimacy with material never left him. His sculptures strip form down to the nerve—clean, lean, elemental. And his obsession with perfection didn’t stop at the art object. Pedestals, light, even photography and film became a facet of the artwork, carefully orchestrated to control how each piece was seen. With more than 150 works on view, and in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, this Brancusi exhibition is the largest in Germany in over 50 years. —Elena Clavarino