Klaus Rinke forged his reputation as a leader of the avant-garde in Germany, using his own body as a measure of space and time and a metaphor for mortality. Later he extended this metaphor to include water: ladling water from the Rhine and all the oceans of the world. He was nicknamed Aquarius as a result. An esteemed art educator he taught for decades at the Düsseldorf Academy before taking up a stint at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles where he explored the phenomenon of duration with scientists and philosophers.