About the work

After experimenting for many years with various materials and techniques, with wood, marble, granite, aluminium and copper, Ewerdt Hilgemann today primarily works with stainless steel, which he deforms in the process of working on his sculptures, with which he in this way, according to the artist in his own words, lends them “a dramatic charisma”.  
The element of air is of decisive importance for the concept artist, who was born in 1938. His creative process follows physical laws: it is based on the distorting forces of the surrounding air, after a vacuum is created inside a geometric stainless-steel body through the suctioning out of the air. The atmospheric pressure deforms the smooth stainless steel, which creates a multiply folded, quite charming body in terms of surface feel – here a slender column, which appears to move almost with the grace of dance following the deformation. The air, according to Ewerdt Hilgemann, is his chisel, his hammer, his tool. “I am a smith of air”, he said of himself. “I suck out the air, but I ultimately breathe life into the sculpture.”