Collateral Sculptures. Art at the Hartmannfabrik 2025

Collateral Sculptures. Art at the Hartmannfabrik 2025
Kunst an der Hartmannfabrik 2025

The start of the European Capital of Culture year Chemnitz 2025 marks the beginning of a new project by Chemnitz investor Udo Pfeifer and his family. The owner of the Hartmannfabrik and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz developed a temporary exhibition project in the outdoor area of the Hartmannfabrik. Selected artists of international renown were invited to develop sculptures and artworks on the grounds and in the gardens of the Hartmannfabrik.

Atelier van Lieshout, Tatjana Doll, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Heike Mutter / Ulrich Genth and Lydia Thomas were initially invited. Further contributions are also being planned. The project was conceived by Sabine Maria Schmidt, curator at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz.

Without a predetermined theme, the exhibition offers an open space for current artistic debates and aesthetic questions that enter into a direct dialog with the visitors. Different approaches and strategies are represented, which are formulated in the context of issues relating to monuments, animal sculpture, figurative and abstract sculpture and painting, iconographic upheavals and pop culture.

The Hartmannfabrik is the information and reception center of the Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025. It is one of the most frequented public venues of the Capital of Culture and therefore has a highly representative function. The hall, built in 1864, was once part of the globally successful engineering company of »locomotive king« Richard Hartmann. Just as it was a center of industrial progress back then, today the Hartmannfabrik is once again a place for creativity and innovation and a symbol of the city’s ability to change, which is characterized by many transformation processes. After a long period of vacancy, the listed building was renovated by the Pfeifer family in a successful public-private partnership, with additional funding from the federal government, the Free State of Saxony and the City of Chemnitz.

Atelier van Lieshout
Vulture, 2022

Vultures are as imposing as they are repulsive. Death is near when this scavenger appears. But vultures are also resourceful, persistent and an indispensable link in many ecosystems. Joep van Lieshout has depicted a stylized vulture in monumental format: powerful, but also cold, protective and at the same time repellent. The animal lacks the nobility of famous heraldic birds such as the eagle, which has always been useful for all kinds of political systems, including dystopian ones. And yet the vulture invites us to sit enthroned under its wing; a place of protection or the seat of a rather amoral ruler’s fantasy? Under the claws of the messenger of death lies an egg: a symbol of new life. But what will hatch? Greed? Power? New disaster? For Lieshout, artists are comparable to vultures. They devour everything that could serve as inspiration. At the same time, their often fragile or provocative art is besieged by numerous claims and hostilities.
Atelier van Lieshout (also known as AVL) is an interdisciplinary artists’ workshop based in Rotterdam. It was founded in 1995 by the artist Joep van Lieshout and has become his brand. Since then, he has created an unusually diverse and rich body of work that blends the classical disciplines of art between sculpture, design, architecture and performance. Many of his works are made of colored, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, a signature material of AVL. Recurring themes in his often provocative and ambivalent works are independence, anarchy, sexualized bodies, fantasies of violence, fascism, exploitation, political systems and their decay.

Tatjana Doll
The Light at the End of the Tunnel is the Light of the Locomotive coming towards me, 2024

For the small district heating station in the garden at the Hartmannfabrik, the artist has conceived a three-sided wall design in the outdoor space. In it, she collages her own paintings from various series of works, which incorporate both art-historical references (such as Otto Dix, Henri Rousseau and Georg Baselitz) and pop-cultural quotes (Simpsons, Star Wars). War, threat, danger, unrest, but also resistance and humor come together here and seem like an echo of current conflicts. All motifs are advertising poster prints of originals, which she realizes in a direct, fast and sometimes raw painting style in large-format lacquer and oil paintings. When working with lacquer paints, imperfections such as shiny surfaces, cracks, color streaks and deformations are staged as part of the painterly process. Painting is never as perfect as the serial industrial products of our thoroughly capitalized culture.
Tatjana Doll’s paintings are dedicated to the industrial products of our »high civilization«, which surround and influence us, which we consume and with which we adorn ourselves: Cars, trucks, cleaning vehicles, paper cups, fire extinguishers, pictograms, suitcases, airplanes, but also famous paintings and icons, all captured realistically and in large format, often lifesize. Last but not least, she asks how much space we actually give to all these things, especially in public spaces. The artist uses painting to reverse the power relations of representation. Tatjana Doll has been a professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe since 2009. The multi-award-winning and internationally renowned artist lives in Berlin.

Franka Hörnschemeyer
Equation (e1), 2020

Hörnschemeyer explores relational notions of space. She often works with found construction materials and modular systems to reveal the patterns and proportions on which much of our built environment is based. All traces of the materials’ previous use are equally important to the artist, because »only a small part of the material is matter, the rest is information«. Here it is recycled formwork elements from a construction company whose logo can still be read on the panels. They are assembled into a cube that is balanced on the dark red raster-like iron grids. The sculpture becomes an equation that transforms an inside and outside, an above and below, and presents spatial power relations as dynamic. At the same time, it questions the nature of the ground on which it and we all stand and whether other conclusions can be drawn about our spatial location. »If we are standing on something, are we not also standing under, next to and above all in something?«
Franka Hörnschemeyer is a sculptor who finds her artistic roots in minimal and conceptual art and the associated institutional critique. Her installations made from industrially prefabricated materials are often described as border crossings between architecture and spatial art. She has worked as a university lecturer in Karlsruhe, Los Angeles, Bremen and from 2015 – 2024 at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. She lives in Berlin. One of her best-known works is BFD – bündig fluchtend dicht, a labyrinthine construction of grid-like shell elements in an inner courtyard of Berlin’s Paul Löbe House, a building of the German Bundestag. In 2011, she realized the walk-in architectural installation Trichter (Funnel) in Dresden, which leads underground and was awarded the mfi Prize for Art in Architecture.

Heike Mutter / Ulrich Genth
Sleeping Horse, 2023

The plinth-mounted Sleeping Horse can immediately be read as a strong counter-image to the well-known classical splendors of equestrian monuments. In them, horses embody the virility and power of their glorious masters. Here, on the other hand, the sleeping horse lies stretched out life-size, peacefully on its side in deep sleep. As flight animals, horses in nature often sleep standing up or rest their heads on the ground in a chest position to get up more quickly. A horse only rarely sleeps on its side when it feels safe, because this position makes it more vulnerable to danger. In herds, individual animals often take over the »watch« while the others rest. The production of the sculpture combines a classic monumental language with the latest technology: a sleeping (Viennese) horse was digitally captured using photogrammetry and printed out in three dimensions in individual parts using a special process. It was then assembled, naturalistically reworked down to the smallest detail and then cast in bronze and patinated.

The artistic work of Mutter / Genth is dedicated to researching and co-designing the conditions of the public sphere. Since 2003, the Hamburg-based artists have been jointly developing interventions in public space by means of which they put political, historical, social and aesthetic conditions of public places up for discussion. With their critical interrogations of monuments and historical sites in particular, they are constantly opening up new routes in the narrative spaces of urban history. Their walkthrough rollercoasters (Tiger & Turtle and Spacewalk) are among the most spectacular and most photographed contributions to public space internationally. The Sleeping Horse was originally created for a temporary presentation on Reumannplatz in Vienna.

Lydia Thomas
Gravitation (Cyberfaun and Guardian), 2024

With her two-part sculptural ensemble, the artist seduces us into the world of metamorphoses and digital fictions. She combines various artistic traditions and languages. The smaller aluminium Guardian, attached to the façade of the building, can be recognized as the watchman of a virtual world with its VR glasses. The sculpture radiates lightness and dynamism. Some may be reminded of Marvel heroes such as the Silver Surfer, a superhero comparable to the ancient Prometheus, who wanted to save the earth from the planet-devouring god Galactacus, but he failed and was no longer allowed to leave orbit with his surfboard. The life-size bronze Cyberfaun follows a different sculptural tradition, showing influences of both 19th century French sculpture and realistic sculpture from the GDR. The faun is a thoroughly hybrid creature between human and animal, a virtual avatar and descendant of mythological creatures. At the same time, it stands for the connection between nature, man and technology. It gropes its way into an uncertain, but certainly technologically designed future.
Lydia Thomas was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt. The family moved to Bavaria in 1989 and returned to Chemnitz in 2004. Thomas discovered her love of painting at an early age and began training as a design assistant. From 2009 to 2015, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Thomas uses realistic means to place her figures in surreal environments. She is also increasingly creating sculptures. She has lived and worked in Chemnitz and Dresden for several years

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