eschenau summer press publications

17 - ewerdt hilgemann « random sculptures »
for herman « random sculptures »
torano di carrara, 11.00 – 12.00 a.m. on a day in august 1980
ewerdt hilgemann; photography Wolfgang Lukowski, Frankfurt
eschenau : the eschenau summer press publications & temporary travelling press publications
herman de vries, publisher
1980
the eschenau summer press publications 17
Printed by Van den Dool, Sliedrecht (NL)
Edition 150 copies, numbered and signed by the artist
© ewerdt hilgemann.

White cover, containing 12 photographs
black & white (21 × 14.8 cm.)
figure left shows 4 out of 12.

Ewerdt Hilgemann
Having already begun working with stone in the second half of the 1970s, Hilgemann subsequently dedicated himself more intensively to this material in the early 8Os: His impressions of the famous marble quarries in Carrara - where he maintained a studio from 1975 to 1984 fascinated and appalled him in equal measure: The destruction wrought in modern times by the rigorous commercial exploitation of the quarry, which has been famous since antiquity, shocked the artist. This ultimately prompted a series of action responses, which by virtue of their radicality could not fail to influence his subsequent work:
"By 12th June the time had come. I arranged for a block of marble, measuring 150 × 150 × 150 cm, which I'd polished myself, to be transported back to the very same quarry, from which Michelangelo used to obtain his marble. Then amidst much ballyhoo the cube was rolled down a mountain, a 330-metre-long slope of marble debris. Scratched and damaged, but internally still unscathed, it remained lying there. Thus I succeeded in acting out Michelangelo's dictum that the quality of a sculpture can survive being rolled down a mountain, with its essence remaining in tact."
Back in 1980 Hilgemann had captured the striking contradiction between the brutish grey trucks and the majestic power of the white marble blocks in the photo series 'Random Sculptures', which shows truckloads of massive blocks of quarried marble in Carrara. The photos and the subsequent action of throwing down hill the marble cube served as the springboard for Hilgemann's new artistic direction. In another action in 1983 he pushed a large steel cube with an edge length of 200 cm from the roof of a five-storey factory building. Here too the deformation of the sculpture caused by the impact - over which the artist has no influence - creates an intensely aesthetic contrast to the still recognisable, but now heavily deformed, pure form of the cube. This was followed in 1984 by the first implosion of an equally large cube made of corrosive steel.
TEXT CREDITS
Citation from Uwe Ruth, 'Ewerdt Hilgemann's Aesthetic of Life', in catalogue Ewerdt Hilgemann : Bodies of Work / Antoinette de Stigter, Piet Sanders Jr. ; texts Antoinette de Stigter, Frans Jeurssen, Uwe Ruth et al. (Art Affairs : Amsterdam cop. 2009) 34-41, citation on p. 37-38.
IMAGE CREDITS
Portrait: Voestalpine.