Fine art – Wieland Förster: formation and invention

Biographical, which only available to him, he has transferred to the sculptural metaphor, which lifts the personal in the general, the feeling and experience of an individual into the existential experience of many. Suffering and love, the contradiction of life and death, aggression and suffering found their shape in his work. The sculptor Wieland Förster, who also presented a formative work as a graphic artist and writer, dedicated his memorials to the countless nameless victims around the world. “Formation and invention are reduced to the biographical report,” said Förster, who has suffered the worst health and psychological damage even in his early years, in 1995 in Dresden at the inauguration of his sculpture “nameless – without face, the wrongly persecuted after 1945 “, From what has been the case since the” Passion ” – it represents a male body on mercilessly damaged nudity -” has long since grown into the world’s human “.

Of the victims of National Socialism, “whose suffering is without a comparison”, he thinks with special attention, because he has seen as a child and adolescent what fascist dictatorship is. The fact that “great martyrdom” devoted to these victims, which, in the 1970s, did not fit in the concert hall in Frankfurt/Oder because of the lack of any political pathos did not fit into the concert hall in Frankfurt/Oder: Four heading. Body merge into one body, meat.

The full pain of sunken »great grieving man. Dedicated to the victims of February 13, 1945 in Dresden «-Förster this inferno, when the baroque Dresden fell into the rubble and ashes, has been established on Georg Treuplatz (on the Brühlsche Terrace), which has been formed for one Place of grief, the reflection and honor of the dead. Naked, with legs attracted, the man crumbles curved together on a narrow base, his hands hit in front of the face, as if he couldn’t endure the sight of what has happened there.

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From the fascination for the subjectivity of humans, the passion for a forester can be declared a portrait. “People must have touched me in whatever form, they must have played a role in me.” So he created a large number of portrait plastic, from poets, composers, visual artists, conductors, theater and scientists. Each of the portrayed has a secret, his secret. “Without a secret that slowly reveals itself at work, no art,” says Förster.

The characterically rising, overshanging “Nike” from 1998 has probably gone through the fire, the wing couple shortened, burned, the body covered with scars, and yet the symbolic shape has gained a new freedom, a breathing rhythm and a dancing exhilaration that “Age freedom” of the artist. “Nike ’89, victory with broken wings” stands in front of the state parliament in Dresden, while the “Nike ’89”, which was uploading on a granite column, was inaugurated on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall on the Glienicker Bridge. The hope of survival, on the last time the last great sculptural work of Förster is contrasted by the ski -made “Marsyas – Century Balance” due to the overdraft on the feet. And this polarity has continued to accompany the sculptor into the new secular than still open question about the dignity and self -determination of man.

In an insignificant concentration on one thing, on a thought, somehow surviving, being helplessly delivered and still passing, that is the inner topic of Förster’s strongly autobiographically shaped novel »TaGaschito«, that large -scale synthesis of political time diagnosis And sensually poetic reality. Live – but under what conditions – or death. In the last round, people are on their own. Every story must remain open, must not have an end, no events have been completed, it continues to work. The unobstructable forced situation increases to the existential strength of the individual, which only gains clarity about himself. The narrator tells to understand, understand that, to work through what has burdened him there for decades.

Wieland Förster is one of the most important figurative sculptors in the second half of the 20th century, which is still not reflected in the museum pretentations of the whole country. In an admirable life’s achievement, he realized himself artistically – but always also reflecting on himself and the world. A television team is currently working with him. And if we agree with him that art is the highest form of reminder as well as hope, then we can confidently keep it with the writer Ilse Aichinger, which he also appreciates: »And the glow of greater hope floods the fear of the world. “