Pickaxe (Kassel)

Sculpture pickaxe , documenta 7

The pickaxe is a steel sculpture by the Swedish - American pop artist Claes Oldenburg in Kassel on the Hiroshima bank at the Auedamm on the Fulda .

The oversized 12.25 m high pickaxe is Claes Oldenburg's documenta 7 contribution from 1982. Claes Oldenburg was inspired by a pickaxe that was stuck in a pile of earth behind the orangery . In his sculptures, the artist alienates everyday objects by playing artistically with familiar scales or materials . He turns it into its opposite and surprising. During the preparations for documenta 7, Oldenburg became aware of the importance of Wilhelmshöher Allee in the Kassel cityscape as the completion of an absolutist design. It has been connecting the copper Hercules on the ridge of the Habichtswald with the city of Kassel since the second half of the 18th century . Oldenburg mentally extended the parabola of the throwing Hercules beyond the Brüder-Grimm-Platz , over the Rosenhang and the Hessenkampfbahn to the Fuldaufer. The pickaxe is stuck diagonally in the meadow on the Fulda.

With the pickaxe, Oldenburg recalls the history of the reconstruction of Kassel after World War II. The rubble that could no longer be recycled was piled up on the rose slope and worked with pickaxes.

Since the ancient hero Hercules throws an ordinary pickaxe, Oldenburg gives the work of art an ironic note. The pickaxe is not in physical equilibrium, but could become unstable. Oldenburg thus creates a spatial tension, in particular through its inclination and spreading to the front and to the side.

literature

• Anne Fingerling: art in public space thrown far. Culture magazine, Kassel. November 2017
• documenta 7 . Verlag Weber and Weidemeyer, Kassel 1982 ISBN 978-3-920453-02-6

Individual evidence

1. ^ Anne Fingerling: Art in the public space-far thrown. Culture magazine, Kassel. November 2017

Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 38.3 "  N , 9 ° 30 ′ 11.1"  E