 It was thanks to the private initiative of Tony Cragg, a British sculptor living in Wuppertal, that the Sculpture Park was founded and established. Thirty years after Cragg took up his exhibition activity, he began looking for a permanent site for presenting sculpture outdoors and discovered the abandoned Waldfrieden property, which he bought in 2006. That very same year he began redesigning the park grounds and the buildings that, after long years of vacancy, needed to be thoroughly renovated and modernized. In appreciation of the historical estate, its former structures and material substance were preserved to the greatest extent possible, thus keeping its historical dimension intact despite the conversion of the park and buildings to accommodate their new use. In 2008, the Sculpture Park was opened under the auspices of the Cragg family’s nonprofit foundation. It houses a steadily growing collection of sculpture, including examples from Tony Cragg’s own large oeuvre. All is accompanied by changing exhibitions of internationally known artists, lectures on culture and the humanities, as well as concerts. Beyond this, the Cragg Foundation is also dedicated to research on, and the publication of, the subject of the fine arts. In the Park, the perception of art is bound up with, and inseparable from, an experience of nature. The special character of the Waldfrieden estate is marked by its situation on a slope. The steep ascent above the narrow V-shaped Wupper valley and a stony ground that discourages residential housing resulted in the preservation of much inner-city forest. One step at a time, the Cragg Foundation is expanding its collection of notable sculpture. The focus is on the modern and the contemporary; however the collection means to evolve beyond this. An encounter with three dozen sculptures in nature stimulates our perceptions. Even now the tour of the grounds brings together very different and quite complex forms of sculptural praxis. The sculptures by Anthony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Thomas Schütte, Wilhelm Mundt, Norbert Kricke and others show a whole range of major positions on modernism and the present-day. Different from a closed exhibition room, the Park confronts the work and the viewer with the fleeting phenomena of the day and the season. The mighty leafy umbrella of old trees combines with the park setting to a living, breathing terrain, which allows warmth and cold, wet and dry, leaf coloring and light reflections of the seasonal position of the sun to interact with the sculptures and impact their formal appearance. Website: skulpturenpark-waldfrieden.de Hasti Sardashti - Award Winning, Authentic, Moving, Original Sadegh Tirafkan - Legendary Iranian Artist who Paved the Way Dorit Levinstein - Welcome to a Universe of Forms, Figures, and Colors Tints Of Resilience: Exploring the Potential of Art in Developing Resilience Tekla Evelina Severin - Captivating Art Direction and Photography from Stockholm Comments are closed.
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