About the work

Ewerdt Hilgemann’s sculptural method is spectacular, and anyone who has once witnessed such a dramatic spectacle will confirm this. At the beginning of this process is a carefully worked and welded geometric figure of stable stainless steel – in this case a cube, the basic form in Hilgemann’s sculptural work. Connected to a vacuum pump, the air is now withdrawn slowly from the hollow body. It takes a bit of time, but the surfaces increasingly yield and collapse, groaning and moaning. The side edges give way and the immaculate sculpture folds and distorts in a continuing metamorphosis. What still appeared to be the expression of a systematic and constructive artistic attitude is subject to a powerful dynamic due to the effects of the elementary forces of nature, which are inscribed deeply into the sculptural body. Destruction and creation, strict construction and coincidence, rational planning and the free play of physical forces unite in works like these.

“For me”, according to the artist, “real art, old or new, is always a combination of intellect and emotion. Art must have an irrational quality, however rational the methods used to originate them might be.”