7 days.
Naked.
Nowhere to hide.

Entrepreneur. Sales and marketing professional. Lecturer. Professional driver. An artist working with his own body.

I have never reduced my working life to a single profession or a single identity. My path has taken me through international trade, logistics, technical sales, management, key account management, marketing, quality management, digital marketing and adult education.

Today I combine these experiences with the Transparency Project / Living Sculpture. It is about the human body, nudity, shame, social norms and a conscious engagement with the public and with self-determination.

My career

My career began with an apprenticeship as a freight forwarding clerk and led through international sea and project freight into marketing, technical sales and business development.

For many years I worked as sales manager, key account manager and authorised officer (Prokurist) . My responsibilities included strategic sales development, international customer and partner management, revenue and budget responsibility, forecasting, sales controlling, staff management, quotations, market analysis and trade fair and congress work.

Qualifikation & Weiterentwicklung

I am a certified marketing specialist (IHK) and freight forwarding clerk (IHK) as well as a QM manager and QM auditor (TAW). Later I trained as a digital marketing manager, SEM manager & web analyst, content marketing manager, social media manager and e-commerce manager.

My professional work was internationally oriented for decades. German is my mother tongue; I also speak business-fluent English and basic Dutch.

From a conventional career to Living Sculpture

I did not come from an art academy. I come from business, sales, marketing, logistics, quality management and adult education. That is exactly the perspective I bring to the project.

Since 2026 I have been developing Living Sculpture as a public artistic and social project. I myself become the subject of the inquiry: my body, my biography, my decisions and society's reactions to them become visible.

The human body is not obscene

A central idea of my project is: The human body is not obscene. Nudity is first of all a physical state. Society gives it meaning. I call the learned and socially shaped patterns around nudity and shame shame conditioning.

The project explores what happens when an adult consciously decides to stop hiding his own body according to other people's expectations – deliberately, publicly and documented.

Radical transparency

Being radically transparent does not mean forcing anyone else to do anything. It means making the decision about my own body myself. Consent, clear boundaries, age requirements, the legal framework and mutual respect are therefore explicitly part of the project.

Living Sculpture

The sculpture is not made of stone, metal or plastic. It lives, moves, ages, reacts and is looked at. The human body is placed in an artistic, social and societal context.

The public and its reactions are part of the artwork. Looks, irritation, curiosity, conversations, approval and objection can become part of the documentation.

No anonymous art persona

I am Achim Mentzen. My name is part of the project. My biography is part of the project. My decisions are part of the project. And my body belongs to me.

I do not want to make people adopt my point of view. I want to encourage them to question their own ideas about normality, shame, nudity, freedom and self-determination.

I make myself visible because I consciously decide what I want to make visible.

I do not hide the fact that my body can be looked at, judged and perceived as a visible object.

These reactions are not automatically interpreted as approval or rejection. They are part of the artistic exploration of gaze, shame, the public and self-determination.

I myself decide to show my body publicly as the material and subject of the performance. Nobody else is forced to do anything.

Living Sculpture does not simply show a naked body. It explores what happens when a person consciously lets himself be looked at – with everything that looks set off.

Shame is not avoided but perceived and endured: embarrassment, curiosity, irritation, fascination and the unfamiliar feeling of becoming the object of observation yourself.

Closeness, desire and one's own sexuality are also part of the human body. In this work they are neither excluded nor staged – they remain in the room as honest, open questions. Living Sculpture is not a sexual service.

The question behind it is: How much visibility can a person bear – and where is the boundary that only he himself can draw?

Interaction is allowed. The creative audience may relate to my naked, exhibited body – draw it, photograph it, paint it, position it, touch it, work with it. The body becomes the shared material of the performance.

Images of war, violence and death are shown in public. The living, naked body, on the other hand, is hidden, sexualised or burdened with shame.

I question this order.

We were all born naked. Nudity is part of human life. My performance does not turn this into an abstract argument: I make my own body the subject of the inquiry.

For seven days I am not only naked during an official show. I live there. I sleep there. I eat there. I talk there. Everyday life becomes the artwork.

Nudity is neither hidden nor artificially eroticised. It is simply there.

My naked body should not remain anonymous but be clearly linked to my full name and identity.

Achim Mentzen – Living Sculpture should be publicly recognisable as a clear connection between person, body and art project.

Repetition is explicitly part of the experiment. It is not just about being noticed once in public, but about my body being perceived and documented repeatedly in connection with my name and my artistic work.

The project therefore aims for the widest possible, international and long-term visibility through performances, exhibitions, press, digital media and other public forms of documentation.

Target: My naked body should be permanently linked in public with my name, my identity and my art project – not just once, but repeatedly.

The naked body is not hidden. It becomes visible, tangible and a continuous part of the performance.

Living Sculpture makes the fully visible human body itself the material of the living sculpture – not just for single moments, but as a continuous state of presence, everyday life and public perception.

24 hours a day, for 7 days. Nudity, physical visibility, the public, shame, perception and self-determination are not considered separately but as interconnected parts of the artistic experiment.

Visibility is not just an image. It is a real state: the body is present, moves, lives, is looked at and remains part of the artwork for the agreed duration.

The main page is the central entry point. From here, the existing project pages, press and documentation areas as well as calendar and archive files can be reached, grouped by topic.