Threesome 56

Towering high in the Campus Westend of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and in the Bad Homburg Kurpark, the artist Ewerdt Hilgemann’s brightly shining stainless steel columns can be seen from afar. Their smooth, softly polished surfaces contrast with the buckled shapes of these collapsed ‘implosions’. At the same time, their striking form relieves the sculptures of a rigid four-sidedness, making them appear all the more alive. In Frankfurt, the “Threesome” trio with their varying heights, and the three “Giants” formed of identical pieces, frame the clear geometric structure of the Poelzig building, designed in the 1920’s. Whereas here the vertical lines optically stretch and structure the architecture, Ewerdt Hilgemann’s works seem to have been weakened by an external force. The artist creates the individual deformations in the rectangular cubes by sucking the air out of their airtight hollow stainless steel bodies with a vacuum pump. The ambivalence of the monumental sculptures appearing to be life-like precisely because the air has been sucked out of them is described as follows by Hilgemann: “I take the air out and in the process breathe life in”.