Preview
INGRID HARTLIEB
"Holz ist mein Werkstoff"
06.07.-12.10.2025
Introduction: Andrea Brandl M.A., Leitung Kunsthalle Schweinfurt
At the end of 2024, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart acquired Ingrid Hartlieb´s funnel-shaped iron sculpture Doline from 2000. This purchase has been the first work by a female artist to be added to the museum´s sculpture terrace. Born in Reichenberg, Czech Republic, in 1944, Ingrid Hartlieb is now considered one of he most powerful sculptors of her generation in Germany. With great physical commitment, she has pursued her artistic path unwaveringly, creating a powerful, often monumental and instantaneously recognisable body of work. And yet she has often been ignored by the exhibiting world and the art market, or rather been pushed into the background by her male colleagues.
On the heels of her 80th birthday, the Neumarkt Museum is honouring the artist´s multifaceted oeuvre with around 50 works. In addition to sculptures and selected drawings – which demonstrate that for Ingrid Hartlieb “every idea, every form in space develops from the drawing” – the exhibition also presents several so-called “test-pieces” (Prüfstücke) made of lead or paper, which were created in 1988 during a working scholarship in Chicago.
Ingrid Hartlieb´s large-format sculptures, which nevertheless exude a special calm and power, are made of different types of wood in the form of boards, planks, beams and square timbers that are layered, interlocked, glued, partly screwed together and processed with a chainsaw. The artist then finishes her works with a patina of wax, stain, pigment and varnish. All of them – she calls them Boje, Nische, Räderwerk, Rettungsring, Abstandhalter, Schild und Stange, Zwischenmensch oder auch Fluchtwerkzeug (buoy, niche, cogwheel, lifebuoy, spacer, shield and pole, interperson or even escape tool)– require a complex working process. Formally, the artworks are representational, even if they often appear abstract. Thematically, they revolve around existential categories such as vulnerability, fear, exclusion, the need for protection, and doubt. Ingrid Hartlieb herself describes her work as an “attempt to grasp a fraction of her own existence”. In general, she links her work to fundamental questions of human existence.
“Wood is my material”, emphasises the Stuttgart-based artist, who was the only woman to study in Rudolf Hoflehner´s sculpture class at the State Academy of Fine Arts in the 1970s. Working stays took her to Italy, Paris, Chicago, New York and South Africa. Today, the petite sculptor mostly works in Haigerloch, 70 kilometres away from Stuttgart, in a huge work hall, heaving wooden bocks, driving a forklift truck and repeatedly starting up her chainsaw. She loves wood, its liveliness, its warmth, its diversity and its smell. The wooden sculpture Doline from 1995, which served as casting model and whose surface texture can be clearly seen in Stuttgart, is on display in the overview exhibition in Neumarkt.