Heinrich Gerhard Bücker

Main portal of the St. Clemens Basilica (Hanover) : Scenes from the Johannes apocalypse

Heinrich Gerhard Bücker (born March 5, 1922 in Vellern ; † August 11, 2008 there ) was a German sculptor , painter and calligrapher .

Life

After finishing school and an apprenticeship as a sculptor with Heinrich Lückenkötter in Oelde, Bücker studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Munich from 1942 - not drafted into military service due to a riding accident . His teachers were mainly professors Bernhard Bleeker and Josef Henselmann . Bücker shared his studio with Gottfried Böhm . When the academy was destroyed by bombs in 1944, Bücker returned to Vellern and in the winter semester of 1946/47 became assistant to the sculptor Prof. Edwin Scharff at the State Art School Hamburg . At the end of 1947 he went back to Vellern because he was able to build a spacious studio on the property of his parents' farm. Since then, Bücker has lived and worked there.

plant

Many of his themes come from the biblical-Christian world of symbols. After his expressively reducing formal language, which in some cases was reminiscent of archaic patterns, initially met with rejection, he gained acceptance by the 1960s at the latest and is now regarded as an artist who gave traditional subjects a spiritually sophisticated, contemporary expression. Some of his works were widely used as mass casts in Christian homes.

“There is, so to speak, hardly anything that the artist cannot do - be it stone engraving or ivory cutting, wood carving, drawing and forming in metal and stone. Even setting wooden sculptures in color and priming wooden panels is a familiar manual exercise. "

- Ulla Stöver : Das Münster 1987, 21, 28

Since 1950, Bücker has been involved in the reconstruction, construction and restoration of many important churches and equipped them with altars, sculptures, portals, baptismal fonts and glass windows. His work was initially quite controversial in church circles. B. the baptismal font he designed in the Church of St. Bonifatius (Dortmund) . Notable examples of his work include the St. Peter's Cathedral in Bremen , the Basilica of St. Clement in Hanover , the Collegiate Church in Freckenhorst , the cathedral at Paderborn , in Wuerzburg the Cathedral , the Church of St. Michael and the Neumünsterkirche with the Kilian's shrine , the altar of the cathedral in Gniezno, Poland (consecrated in 1997 by Pope John Paul II) and the choir windows of the cathedral in Avila, which are currently still in progress .

Bücker created numerous large and small cross representations, sculptures and carvings, as well as abstract large-format material pictures using stones, rock crystals, bog oak, etc. ( which he called Genesis Meditations ), which he exhibited in Hamburg in 1974 with great success. A specialty and almost unique in Germany are Bücker's partly larger than life sculptures in alabaster stucco , a technique that used to be common, but has been almost completely forgotten since the 19th century. The sculptures in the St. Michaels Church in Würzburg and in the St. Clemens Basilica in Hanover are exemplary.

In 1967, based on texts by Martin Buber, a woodcut series called Job was published , which was followed in 1970 by further woodcut series on the biblical themes of Genesis , Passion and Apocalypse .

Bücker dealt particularly intensively with the entire Bible . In 1964 the Bible Images of Salvation appeared in large format , including the translation of the Old Testament by Martin Buber, which Bücker visited in Jerusalem and of whom he had created an impressive portrait head in bronze in 1965. Bücker painted and wrote the pictures and the text of this Bible with black ink with an elastic hairbrush in the technique of East Asian painting. Images of salvation , the so-called "Bücker Bible", is available in many Protestant and Catholic churches.

When this Bible was printed, images were overprinted on test prints to save costs. At first, the results were unintentionally astonishing: the randomly printed templates sometimes produced a unit with completely new perspectives. This was recorded by Bücker, pictures of the Old Testament were used to print matching pictures of the New Testament and, with matching texts by Paul-Werner Scheele, published in 1977 as a book under the title Sketches of the Coming .

In 1982 Bücker completed another Bible: Alpha - Atom - Adam - Omega , again painted with Indian ink, with the ink images now filling the entire page. Since 2000 Bücker has been working on another biblical work, this is about 550 multi-colored or overpainted ink pictures.

From 1985 he redesigned the St. Michael choir for the Benedictine nuns of the Marienrode monastery .

But Bücker's work is by no means limited to religious themes. The representation of horses in pictures and sculptures occupies a large space ; he created a cycle of pictures about Alexander the Great with his horse Boukephalos . From 1977 to 2000 a cycle of 17 large-format double pictures on the Odyssey was created , washed and inked pictures colored in different shades of blue on a paper specially developed by Bücker ("fresco paper"). Bücker also created a number of portrait busts and large-format commemorative coins (including those of Martin Buber , Walter Abendroth , Cardinal von Galen , Wilhelm Emmanuel Freiherr von Ketteler , Konrad Adenauer and Pope Johannes Paul II ).

Since his youth, Bücker has also dealt with historical topics and researched in particular the relationship between the Teutons and the Romans. He artistically translated the fruits of these studies into pictures in his book Varus, Varus - Die Tragödie im Heiligen Hain , published in 1987 . This includes the localization of the Varus Battle in 9 AD, which Bücker believes to have taken place between Wiedenbrück and Beckum.

Honors

As the only living artist to date, Bücker received the invitation to exhibit some of his works in the Vatican in the Bibliotheca Apostolica in 1983/84 . Many of his works are in the Vatican Collection of Modern Religious Art .

In 1993 Bücker received the Biblical and Culture Foundation Prize at the Academy of Sciences in Düsseldorf . Bücker is also an honorary citizen of his hometown Beckum.

Book editions

• Images of salvation . Sankt Augustin, several editions since 1964, ISBN 978-3-8050-0221-9 .
• Sketches of the coming (overprints, edited together with Paul Werner Scheele ), Steyler Verlag, Sankt Augustin 1977, ISBN 3-87778-708-8 .
• Alpha - Atom - Adam - Omega: The Bible in Pictures . Sankt Augustin 1982, ISBN 3-87787-157-7 .
• Varus, Varus: The Battle in the Sacred Grove . Catalog for the exhibition in the Beckum City Museum in 1987, 448 pages.

literature

• Thomas Ostendorf u. a .: Time and Eternity - HGBücker . Münster 2006, ISBN 3-87023-206-4 .
• Britta Groll: HGBücker, Alpha and Omega . Catalog for the exhibition in the museums of Kloster Bentlage and Falkenhof, published by the City of Rheine in 2005.
• U. Stöver / R.Paulus: Genesis- Meditations - HG Bücker - Primeval rock and documents of evolution in the material picture catalog 40th BAT exhibition March / April 1972

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Gerhard Bücker  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• About an exhibition in Rheine in 2005
• obituary
• Literature by and about Heinrich Gerhard Bücker in the catalog of the German National Library