Dani Karavan

Dani Karavan (Berlin 2008)

Tzaphone in front of the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament building

Dani Karavan Hebrew דני קרוון (* December 7, 1930 in Tel Aviv ) is an internationally renowned sculptor and designer of large-format, walk-in works of art, which are sometimes assigned to Land Art .

plant

Sculpture “Ma'alot” on Heinrich-Böll-Platz in Cologne. The overall design of the square (1982–86) was also done by Dani Karavan.

In the 1960s and 1970s Karavan designed numerous stage sets, including for the Martha Graham Dance Company .

In 1980, Karavan designed the Ax Majeur in Cergy-Pontoise , a three-kilometer-long, sculptural landscape axis with twelve thematic stations as an identity-creating facility for the satellite town of Cergy-Pontoise near Paris. Cergy Saint-Christophe extends from an industrial area, in which a strictly defined watercourse in the neo-renaissance park forms the central axis, through the train station, further over the market square and the shopping mile. It crosses a pompous, social housing complex designed by the architect Ricardo Bofill with a central 36-meter-high obelisk and ends in a geometrically divided park area several football pitches. This complex with its arrangement of concrete pillars and a flight of stairs provides a view of an artificial island on the other side of the Oise on the slope edge of the valley and is conceptually linked to the large, historically significant axes of Paris.

1988/93 Karavan created the outdoor sculpture The Way of Human Rights (The Way of Human Rights) as architectural art of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg . Since 1995 he has been a member of the jury of the Nuremberg International Human Rights Award .

In 1990 Karavan completed the circular cast iron sculpture " Tzaphon " for the forecourt of the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament in Düsseldorf . The sculpture is a flat, inclined, circular disc, half sunk into the forecourt, in which two railway tracks are embedded in the middle. According to the original concept, water should run down the inclined plane between the railroad tracks. The circular shape of the sculpture corresponds to the structuralist architecture of the state parliament building opened in 1988 .

In 1990/94 Karavan created the monument “Passagen” for Walter Benjamin in the Catalan town of Portbou .

In 1994 he designed a Mémorial national (national memorial) in Gurs on behalf of the French state . It was erected as a reminder and reminder of the injustice committed by the Vichy regime in the Camp de Gurs . The memorial consists of three parts: A 180 m long track, which was not available during the camp, symbolizes the deportation from Germany to Gurs. The model of a barrack embodies the structural equipment of the camp. And at the same time, the track is the connection to the concrete slab fenced with barbed wire, which symbolizes the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazis.

In the 1990s, Dani Karavan designed the exterior of the Spree side of the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus in the area of the Bundestag buildings in Berlin . The central element of this work: he laser engraved the 19 basic rights articles of the German Basic Law in their original version from 1949 into a glass wall about three meters high between the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus and the Spree Fundamental rights, made clear in a transparent way.

Karavan's Garden of Remembrance is located in Duisburg's inner harbor , a three-hectare park in which the sculptor integrated the remains of the former industrial buildings. The park was realized between 1996 and 1999 and is the most extensive work by the internationally renowned artist in Germany to date.

"Path of peace" (Way of Peace) between Israel and Egypt, built from 1996 to 2000

Floor relief "Misrach" on the Regensburg Neupfarrplatz

In Israel , Karavan et al. a. the Negev Brigade Monument in Beersheba and the White City Monument in Tel Aviv.

On the Neupfarrplatz in Regensburg , Dani Karavan drew the floor plan of the synagogue, which was destroyed during the Regensburg pogrom of 1519 , in the form of an accessible floor relief . The work of art with the name Misrach ( Hebrew for 'East'), intended as a meeting place , was inaugurated on July 13, 2005. Karavan made such high demands on the accuracy and surface quality of the concrete parts in advance that almost all companies had rejected the order as "impracticable".

Karavan was invited to create a design for the memorial for the Roma and Sinti murdered by the National Socialists in Berlin . In November 2005 he signed a corresponding contract. The monument was inaugurated on October 24, 2012 in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Joachim Gauck.

Exhibitions

1976: Venice Biennale
1977: documenta 6 , Kassel
1987: documenta 8 , Kassel
1993: Germanisches Nationalmuseum , Nuremberg
2006: Active Museum Spiegelgasse , Wiesbaden
2007: Tel Aviv Museum of Art , Tel Aviv
2008: Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin
2008: Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo

Prizes and awards

1977: Israel Prize
1996: The Kaiserring - Art Prize of the City of Goslar
1997: Pour le mérite for science and the arts
1998: Praemium Imperiale (Japan)
2004: Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture
2014: Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (France)
2018: Honorary Citizen of the City of Nuremberg

literature

IVAM : Dani Karavan , Actar, Barcelona 2002, ISBN 84-482-3230-5
Ursula Peters: Dani Karavan: Path of Human Rights , in: Ursula Peters: Moderne Zeiten. The 20th Century Collection, in collaboration with Andrea Legde, Nuremberg 2000 ( cultural history walks in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum , vol. 3), pp. 274–281.
Pierre Restany: Dani Karavan. Prestel, Munich 1992/1999 ISBN 3-7913-1211-1
Johannes Vesper: Dani Caravan, Retrospective Berlin 2008, Musenblaetter July 16, 2008 [1]
Udo Weilacher: Dani Karavan. Interview in Paris, November 21, 1993 . In: Die Gartenkunst 6 (2/1994), pp. 185–200.
Udo Weilacher: Harmony and Doubt - Dani Karavan (Interview), in: Udo Weilacher: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ISBN 3-7643-6120-4
Udo Weilacher: White memory on a green background. Garden of Remembrance in Duisburg by Dani Karavan , in: Udo Weilacher: In Gardens. Profiles of current European landscape architecture. Basel Berlin Boston 2005 ISBN 3-7643-7084-X