Werner Stötzer

Werner Stölzer would have been 80 years old on 2 April 2011. The Georg Kolbe Museum was planning a presentation of his works to mark the occasion. Now, after the sculptor died on 22 July 2010, there will be a memorial exhibition. On display will be a selection of sculptural figures and torsos, mainly stone sculptures, supplemented by some early bronzes and drawings.

Werner Stölzer, born in 1931 in Sonnenberg in southern Thuringia, received his first training as a ceramic modeller in his home town. He then studied sculpture in Weimar, Dresden and Berlin, most recently as a master student of Gustav Seitz at the Academy of Arts. The young sculptor was inspired by Seitz and his studio neighbour Waldemar Grzimek to create his own figurative works.

What made Stölzer a sculptor in his own right, however, was a clear step out of the shadow of Gustav Seitz; it was his turn to stone as a sculpting material from the mid-1960s onwards. Although he was not trained in stone sculpture, he dedicated himself to this technique, working directly in the material and not, as was traditional, copying plaster models or even having them repeated by stonemasons. Concentrating on the stone gave Stötzer greater creative freedom. This was accompanied by the fact that the torso became the most important motif, i.e. precisely the depiction of people, which does not show the harmony of the whole, but reduced, perhaps even damaged bodies. Initially, the unusual torsos could be explained by the limited space available in the stone block, as the blocks from which they were carved were often former gravestones or steps.

Stötzer frequently provided information about his work: ‘I see my task as a sculptor as being to break up the stone in such a way that it constantly gains new strength… The whole thing is, so to speak, an act of intuition, of instinct. New possibilities, fields and dimensions suddenly develop from the ticking off, which make me cautious… You can only chop away at the stone. You add something to the shape of the stone by taking material from it. So chipping is not a violation.’

Stölzer’s working method virtually respected the stone as a partner: ‘I wanted to create new forms and still leave what the stone brought with it as its own life perceptible.’