Art in architecture: From the basement, into the mind

“If it’s art, it can still be gone!” This condemnation from a distance from the GDR’s social order struck after 1990. Suspension or destruction followed. The opposing opinion arose weakly that monuments were necessary so that even uncomfortable history was not forgotten.

The main focus of the Gotha artist Otto Kayser (1915–1998), for whom a large exhibition is currently being prepared at the Kunstforum Gotha from November this year, was building-related art. This has suffered great loss and experienced only occasional recovery. The outside wall of the Pablo Neruda Polytechnic High School in Erfurt, for example, bore Kayser’s industrial enamel “War and Peace” from 1975. The school name Neruda was dropped after the fall of the Wall, and Kayser’s work now lies dismantled in the basement. It is the image of a woman raising a child above her head – a favorite motif of Kayser. On a pillar in the village of Seebach, the highlight of his building-related art, it bore witness to the triumph of life.

In 1973, on behalf of the Seebach Municipal Council, the “Central Square” in the town near Ruhla was redesigned and received the Erfurt District Council’s Architecture Prize. On the square next to the new school building and the children’s combination, in the middle of two residential areas with district-heated new apartments, an almost six meter high column was erected with a series of twenty-four fully sculptural reliefs carved in copper on the topic “History of the local workers’ movement”.

With columns, fountains and trees, the square provided a beautiful context. Residents, the municipal administration, the local history association with a local chronicler and the mayor at the time regretted the demolition of the column, as a result of which the town lost its center and the square its soul in 1993. The column reliefs are stored in the basement of the cultural center, reflecting human life with expressive forms: scenes of crafts and trades, scenes of the resistance of the working people, allegorical depictions of hardship, despair and resignation, and finally scenes of the industrialization of the 1970s.

The reliefs, whose models were created by Otto Kayser and which were made using copper chasers by the metalworker Klaus Kirchner from Günther Laufer’s workshop in Eisenach, impress with their differentiated artistic ability and lifelike design. The expressive, cubist and allegorically heightened motifs show how the artist understood socialist realism. The recovery of Otto Kayser’s art can be expected in Seebach. Fortunately, there is the political will and the aesthetic interest that in the future the reliefs will find a new place on the empty walls in the cultural center in a protected and dignified manner.

Before that, the planned Gotha exhibition will present three of Kayser’s reliefs: “The Uncertain Future”, mother holding the infant, a symbol of time even today, “The Emergency”, mother with a starving child, and “Happy Future”, mother with a rejoicing child. Gotha is covering the costs of its professional restoration by Ulrich Barnickel, who, as a doctor of Hephaestus, not only demonstrated in his dissertation the artistic ability of the metal and steel sculptors from Giebichenstein Castle, Halle Art College, but also mastered it himself. As the “metalman of the castle,” he sticks to the anthropomorphic design that is now being lost in the “castle.” His enormous main work “Path of Hope” of fourteen monumental iron sculpture groups, a calvary, dominates the Geisaer Berg. Based on this basic attitude, Barnickel wants to help in solidarity to preserve the reliefs of his colleague Otto Kayser: Everything that is bent has to be aligned and smoothed, the patina has to be regained by painting over it with nitric acid, then linseed oil varnish and a small burner, which happily combines all parts of the surface into one overall surface.

In the future, abstract and associative paintings by Veronika Wagner (Seebach) with Otto Kayser’s figurative reliefs will give the Seebach cultural center a great deal of aesthetic tension and serve various interests. The mayor Gerrit Häcker is pleased: “We are getting closer to the ‘real’ cultural use of this house, which was renovated by my predecessors over 20 years ago for many millions of DM without any concept, and are proving that rural areas can definitely be used can be an attractive living space. For me, questions about art and culture are equally important.«