The sculpture “The Sky Over Nine Columns” by German artist Heinz Mack will be exhibited in St. Moritz from December 10. By mid-March 2017, the nine golden steles will be standing on the picturesque lakeside near the dairy. The exhibition is part of an installation journey across Europe.
Seven and a half meters high are the nine golden steles, which the German artist Heinz Mack created from 2012 to 2014 and are now being sent on a journey to impressive places. The work was exhibited at the 2014 Venice Biennale, in the Sakıp Sabancı Museum sculpture park in Istanbul and at the Ciutat de les Arts e les Ciències in Valencia. It will now be seen in the wild for the first time.
The clear, geometric shapes of the golden steles will create a sharp contrast to the natural environment with coniferous forest, snow-covered pastures, the plain of frozen Lake St. Moritz and the mountain landscape of the Upper Engadin. You can also look forward to the effect of the sculpture at different times of day. The nine steles are covered with more than 850,000 light-reflecting, gold-leaf mosaic tiles.
The installation is located on the footpath around Lake St. Moritz, just off the town and can only be reached on foot. This trail is very popular, so “The Sky Over Nine Columns” is likely to be a crowd puller this winter. The unveiling of the steles will take place on Saturday, December 10, 2016, at 15:00. The artist will be present.
The journey of this extraordinary large sculpture to special places in the world is an art project planned for many years, which is designed and realized by the Ralph Dommermuth Foundation for Art and Culture in collaboration with Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art. After Venice, Istanbul, Valencia and St. Moritz, Vienna, Athens and London are being discussed as further stops.
visuals
Images for editorial use can be downloaded free of charge from Flickr: www.flickr.com/ninecolumns/
Invitation to the media
The artists Heinz Mack, Ralph Dommermuth and Michael Beck will be available to the media in St. Moritz on the day of the unveiling, December 10, 2016 at 1:00 p.m. The media conference takes place at Landgasthof Meierei. You will receive details after registration at ninecolumns@gartmann.biz. Please register with us by November 25, 2016.
contact
The Sky Over Nine Columns in St. Moritz
Christian Gartmann | Media Office
ninecolumns@gartmann.biz | Tel. +41 79 355 78 78
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art
Dr. Antonia Lehmann-Tolkmitt
antonia.lehmann-tolkmitt@beck-eggeling.de | Tel. +49 211 4915 8929
The installation
The installation “The Sky Over Nine Columns,” which Heinz Mack created from 2012 to 2014, consists of nine steles over seven meters high with a light-reflecting surface of more than 850,000 mosaic stones with 24-carat gold leaf.
When creating the idea for the installation, Heinz Mack draws on a design for the Pergamon Museum that has remained unrealized so far. Heinz Mack appears to have examined the content of the Altıntepe Temple in Anatolia as well as the temples in Egypt and the six pillars of the Temple of the Queen of Sheba in Yemen. The installation highlights the intercultural connection between Orient and Occident, which plays an important role in the artist's work, not only through reference to historical temples, but also through the material of the mosaic.
Heinz Mack developed his own language of light and color in the 1950s and is considered a leading representative of kinetic art. “The Sky Over Nine Columns” refers to his concept of the “light stele”, which was first formulated and realized by the artist in 1958 in his Sahara project. His works in public space, whether in urban space or in nature, are always designed as objects of light: “Light is decisive for my art. When it comes to light, I want to push the limits of what's possible.”
Heinz Mack
Heinz Mack was born in 1931 in Lollar in Hesse and attended the Düsseldorf State Academy of Arts from 1950 to 1953. He also completed his studies in philosophy at the University of Cologne in 1956. In 1958, together with Otto Piene, he founded the group ZERO, which Günther Uecker also joined in 1961. With its activities, exhibitions and manifestos, ZERO attracted great attention and developed into a worldwide movement. The artists primarily used light and movement as a new language of form in order to overcome the pessimism of the post-war years and to find a more open world.
Heinz Mack took part in documenta in Kassel in 1964 and 1977. In 1970, together with three other artists, he represented Germany at the 35th Venice Biennale. In 2001, Heinz Mack was honored as the first Western artist after the Islamic Revolution with a comprehensive exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.
Since his major retrospective in 2011 in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany on his 80th birthday, interest in Heinz Mack's art has increased enormously. Heinz Mack was represented at the important ZERO exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014 with 23 ZERO works. In addition, his works have received international attention in major ZERO exhibitions in Berlin, Amsterdam and Istanbul. Mack's work is represented in over 130 public collections. A variety of publications and two films document his work to this day. Heinz Mack lives and works in Mönchengladbach and Ibiza.