Sculpture: breaking out of the material

The basic feature of the art of these two sculptors is the openness, the broken, fragile form, not the weight of the immovable. Moving space and sculpture intertwine. Her figures in bronze, clay and terracotta, which remain in motion, present themselves in a powerful and desperate self-assertion. They seek to break out of the material: to blow up the bronze that restricts them, to escape from the terracotta, the “burnt earth”.

Sylvia Hagen, who lives in Altlangsow im Oderbruch, maintains the precise balance between myth and reality, dream and awareness of time. The bodies she creates are visually refracted with a high degree of sensitivity. They consist of individual, roughly assembled pieces, severed limbs with a cracked, perforated surface and a damaged shape, with breaks, ridges, cracks, injuries, a constant juxtaposition of light and shadow. These structures refuse to be seen at first glance, expecting us to first fathom their anthropomorphic diversity and ambiguity. Only then do they allow us to deal with them.

Sylvia Hagen applies plaster to a framework that mostly remains skeletal and functionally visible at the ends of the limbs, crumbling with flickering form. Surfaces arise that are the end of a movement from within – but often they do not close; Space, the environment and time have given bodies their imprints. »Wave II« (2014, bronze) resembles a rock formation, barely recognizable as a female torso arching over the ground.

Her figures in bronze, clay and terracotta depict themselves in powerful and desperate self-assertion.

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If sirens actually lure and invite, then the “Little Siren” (2014, terracotta, engobed) in its damaged form is as if eaten away by time. The inner energy and organic vitality of the form, the hollow forms and openings that pierce the space, the relationships between inner and outer forms, the connections between sculpture and landscape can always be observed differently.

The Berlin sculptor Christa Collector was a master student of Gustav Seitz in the 1950s. In correspondence with her teacher’s works, she gives a review of her sculptural and drawing work. In her early days she modeled girl figures that embodied sensuality and awareness (“Shirt Taking Off,” 1958; “Lying Woman with Apple,” 1963) without bringing any narrative moments into play.

Her relationship to Mediterranean art is particularly expressed in her reliefs, because its “beauty comforts and calms,” says collector. “We need peace, comfort and joy.” Using very different finds, impressions, experiences and investigations, she composes works that radiate a harmonious harmony between art and nature.

For example, with the relief-like faience “Berliner Stillleben IV” (1970), she created a uniform, harmonious and yet enigmatic composition from glass shards she reassembled from the destroyed Nikolaikirche in Berlin. In a completely different way, the bronze relief “Troy, Skull in Helmet” (1980) sets the present in analogy to antiquity.

The relief cycle “Man – Nature – Laws” (1986–1991), a work commissioned for the Academy of Sciences, seeks to deal with the interaction between natural processes and human life in an abstract way. It is always – in collector’s own words – “reflection as a commitment to today” that makes this artist’s so richly descriptive formal language.

»Sylvia Hagen. Traces: Bronze – Clay – Paper”, until December 22nd, Neuhardenberg Castle; »Christa collector at Seitz. Connectedness in Art and Correspondence”, until February 23, 2025, Gustav Seitz Museum, Trebnitz near Müncheberg.