„Before it was a piece of art, now it’s a monument“
Rome may be the eternal city of marble, but Florence is the bronze bronze. Donatello's and other Renaissance sculptors' olive-colored human figures not only define urban space, they also form part of the core of the National Museum Bargello; the Uffizi, too, had a veritable collection of noble bronzes as the origin of the Medici treasury and art. Because the German sculptor Fritz Koenig mainly worked with this material, the first great retrospective on his work in the Florentine Uffizi and in the Medici Boboli Gardens follows the artist's logic.
With eleven halls in the Uffizi and another ten dozen figures pouring out of the hectares of the Boboli Gardens, it is the largest sculpture exhibition ever to be found in the renaissance city, which is certainly not poor in sculpture, as Uffizi director Eike Schmidt emphasizes.
There is also a political reason for this detour via Florence, where elephant-sized bronze sculptures were transported across the Alps in heavy load transports. For it confirms for more than a year in a provincial sect the worn-out sentence that the prophet in his own country is not valid. Landshut, Koenig's long-standing studio for decades as the natural site of a retrospective, has neither posthumously - Koenig died at the age of ninety-two at the beginning of 2017 - posthumously postponed the artist to such an extent that Bavarian media repeatedly stunned reported.
On the contrary: Koenig's unique studio empire on the Ganslberg near Landshut is in acute danger, his collection of hundreds of valuable sculptures from Africa already carelessly mothballed. The Künstlerhaus, which he designed himself in the tradition of modernism in 1961, as well as the sculptures precisely placed in the surrounding court landscape, were to be preserved as an ensemble. It would be a Bavarian World Museum and Humboldt Forum on a small scale, devised by an artist down to the last detail, in which every visitor would understand how decisively modernity is influenced by archaic and African art.
Thus, the retrospective in Florence is also the attempt to give the sculptor the attention it deserves. And this effort succeeds with downright Italian sprezzatura. It should not really need this drumming at all. Koenig's sculptures are present in countless southern German cities, however, often in the context of art-on-building projects before mediocre public Gebäegegususkeiten turned off, so that it represents for almost all thirty bronze figures of Koenig a real liberation to hanibalisch over the Alps to have wandered and himself in the urban space of Florence.
In the United States, Koenig knows almost every child as an artist of the "Great Sphere Caryatid" aka "The Sphere," which was miraculously retrieved from the rubble of the New York World Trade Center almost intact. In addition to the Uffizi director, the American ambassador opened the exhibition, and the Moma in New York has also sent an important loan to Italy. Thus, the survival of the work of art is interpreted as a resurrection of ruins, incarnating the unwavering will of New Yorkers' self-assertion; Ball caryatid forms the center of Liberty Park in the shadow of the new tower today as a spring burst from the former rubble.
Koenig 's work does, however, also produce this charge, since - as the sequence of his stylistic development in the exhibition clearly shows - it gradually emerged from the broken, energy - symbolizing sphere, which for Koenig was the archetype, from the concentrated life germ to the Eyeball and votive, what has become the bullet for Koenig since an existential eye disease. Room VII with the reduced ball caryatid on a massive, yet rotatable bronze moonlit is thus the hinge room within the enfilade of the show, the other basic themes of Koenig in the halls, such as "Eros" and "Thanatos", many horse sculptures full of verve, but also the Holocaust , Dachau and Plötzensee-Mahnmälern, merges.
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