Werner Stötzer

Werner Stötzer, born 1931 in Thuringia’s Sonneberg, and deceased 2010 in Altlangsow bei Seelow in the region of the Oderbruch, was East Germany’s most beloved sculptor. He shaped the medium of sculpture in the GDR with work in an universal style, a far cry from the prevalent dogma of “Socialist Realism,” and also as teacher to a younger generation. And yet he remained a solitary figure. In his sculptures, an unfathomable remainder always appears. He studied at the Kunsthochschule of Weimar and then of Dresden, later in Berlin with Gustav Seitz. In 1978, he was made a member of the Akademie der Künste; and he served as its vice president and master teacher for young sculptors from 1990 to 1992. His awards included the Käthe-Kollwitz Prize, the National Prize, and the Art Prize of Brandenburg. Stötzer’s blocks never have the smile characteristic of antique sculpture. For him, every stone was possessed of its own law, which a good sculptor had to follow. His sculptures can also be read as milestones in his life, as signs pointing to beauty and catastrophe. Lifelong, whatever stone he might take under his hammer and chisel, it was a torso. He chiseled this fragmentary form of the body from the yellowish sandstone of Saxony, from the gray marble of Bulgaria, and from the glittering white stone of northern Italy’s Carrara. The trail of stones he left behind him have been installed in many a museum – several of them in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, for instance – as well as in parks and church plazas in Berlin, Brandenburg and farther north: We can see one on the mole in Warnemünde, where a female figure carved in sandstone looks out towards the Baltic Sea, like a modern Penelope waiting for her Odysseus. 

His works are titled Wegzeichen (Pathmarks), Märkische Steine (Stones from the Marches), Engel mit gebrochenem Flügel (Angel with a Broken Wing); designated sparingly as Sitzende (Sitting Figure), Stehende (Standing Figure), Liegende (Lying Figure); or bear the names of rivers, like Werra and Saale. For the Cathedral plaza in Würzburg, the confessed atheist created a Pietà from stone. And the Marx-Engels-Forum on the river Spree in Berlin-Mitte is flanked by his figurative relief, a reference to the frieze of gods and giants from Pergamum now installed on the Museum Island. Stötzer viewed his stones as marks he left along his path through life as a sculptor; they created a landscape of bodies. And his figures never entirely erase the block in which they remain half-submerged. Today, these stones act as posthumous ambassadors for an art that knows neither time nor fashion. And yet every form remains, or becomes again, a fragment: Such was the legacy of his experience of the ruins of 1945. Stötzer felt an affinity with the formal language of Michelangelo, Giacometti, and Henry Moore. His surfaces bear the traces of short, targeted strokes of the chisel – working from outside to inside and around and around.

text: Ingeborg Ruthe, translation: Darrell Wilkins