By Werner Haftmann
The sculptor Martin Mayer is integrated in his artistic work and thinking into the traditions and forms of southern German, especially Munich, contemporary sculpture. Munich has not only been his chosen home since the age of 15 (1946), but also his artistic, intellectual and personal environment. He was born in Berlin on 16 January 1931. A sculptor as sensitive as Gerhard Marcks, who always saw himself in the Prussian tradition of Schadow, was quite rightly surprised when Martin Mayer showed him photos of his work in the summer of 1967: "It's hard to believe that you were born in Berlin - not only are your subjects genuine, innocent Munich "witches" - your whole approach breathes the Isar air, even in the spiritual sense." Marcks noted "a southern perfection in which sensuality has found its most beautiful and adequate form".The artist's coincidental birthplace of Berlin, however, was not without influence. Mayer likes to say that as a child he was so impressed by the equestrian statue of the Great Elector by Andreas Schlüter on the Schloßbrücke in Berlin that it made him want to become a sculptor and create something similar. The voluminous baroque style that characterises the powerful sculptural presence of Schlüter's works has remained active as a hidden drive in Mayer's imagination. Moreover, his parents were from the Palatinate. Thus, in the development of his personality, southern sensuality and a feeling for earthiness came into play quite naturally. Both his parents were commercial artists, and their work made it easy for Mayer to grow into and feel at home in an artistic profession from an early age - without bohemian traits, without avant-garde elite consciousness. It is this natural quality, the powerful sensuality of penetrating vision and the almost voracious curiosity for the vivid productions of the living environment surrounding him that characterise the artist. His whole attention is directed outwards, aiming to take possession of the characteristic phenomena of his environment brought to him by his untiringly inquisitive desire to see.
Self-representation, even in the expressive sense, is not in his nature. Thus one will search in vain for a self-portrait among the numerous busts. His own development, the framework of data in which a life unfolds and presents itself as "development", is also strangely alien to him. He is quite helpless when asked, as a historian should be, about the dates of origin of his sculptures. He has to think about it first - or even look it up - he doesn't really understand the point of the question. Everything he has done in his thirty years as a sculptor remains present to him, belonging to a circle of figures that surrounds his life and grows out of it, like branches of a tree that have grown one after the other in time. These brances are present when looking at the tree as a whole and do not cover the trunk from which they grew, but confirm it as their common origin.
Thus, in the choice of arrangement of the panels in this book, which is solely his own, Mayer by no means adheres to a strict chronological sequence, as would be the obvious for a historically trained person, and rather searches for figurative correspondences and often surprising formal or thematic links in the gestures of the figures. For everything that has been done still relates to its present existence as well as to the trunk from which the figures grew.
It is therefore inevitable that certain characteristics of his outer appearance and inner attitude to life are metaphorically reflected in the appearance of his figures: The openness and sensuality of this strong, stockily built man of good height, as well as the "pyknical" character of his appearance and attitude to life, with its enthusiasm for the fullness of existence and the physical forms that accompany it, and fondness for exaggerating it with a sense of humour bordering on the burlesque. A born sculptor who finds figurative correspondences purely through contemplating his natural surroundings, Mayer soon discovered the figure of the plump young woman as a suitable guiding light. Those "innocent Munich witches", as Marcks said, with their weighty corpulence, eroticised by a coquettish fullness of being and yet passively sleepy, tempted him to the most daring and intimate compositions. Yet these apparently spontaneous pictorial counter-representations, seemingly emerging purely from sensual pleasure in the natural impression, are based on a precise traditional foundation. Like all recent Munich sculpture, this foundation starts with Adolf von Hildebrand. This was not, however, a preconceived decision on the part of the young Martin Mayer; he grew into it - and he was lucky.
When he was just 15 years old, Theodor Georgii, Hildebrand's pupil and son-in-law and professor of sculpture at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, took notice of him and arranged for him to be allowed to join his class despite his youth. The two quickly developed a close relationship. He became Georgii's favourite pupil and was soon allowed to work as an assistant in his private studio. Georgiis' studio was located in Hildebrand's Munich house and was also his former studio. The furnishings, inventory and tools were all left over from him. Since Georgii bequeathed all this to his young pupil, Mayer still uses Hildebrand's tools today - and is proud of them. When Georgii died in 1963, Mayer was allowed to continue working in the Hildebrandhaus studio by his will until it was sold in 1968 and used for other purposes.
Georgii was the devoted pupil of his master. He softened the taut architectonics of Hildebrand's classical conception of the figure a little through the addition of a cautious lyricism. It was as if the quiet influence of the terracottas of Magna Grecia, which he knew from his many stays in Italy and of which his friend Anton von Stadler, who was director of the Munich Academy at the time, had a fine collection, had dampened the severity of classical antiquity a little. More important was Hildebrand's intellectual background, his sculptural thinking. His treatise "The Problem of Form" was the handbook of every German sculptor for decades; not only in Munich. Even years after the last war, I spent hours discussing Hildebrand's idea of the "distant image" with the Rhenish sculptor Ewald Mataré, as intensively as if it were a contemporary problem - which indeed it still is. As a direct student of Hildebrand with a close personal bond, Georgii was entirely absorbed by his wide-ranging theories, which were also influenced by the pictorial and philosophical-aesthetic thinking of such exquisite minds as his former friends Hans von Marées and Konrad Fiedler. He was able to convey this to the young sculptor easily and without the ponderousness of a didactic approach in the course of their work together. His ideas boiled down to a few main propositions: In its imitation of nature (the "imitative"), visual art was "a kind of exploration of nature". The problems of form were "dictated by this insistent perception of nature". Form filters the "architectural" out of perception, draws out the inner construction of the whole of form, the organic whole of relationships. "Architectural design is that which creates a higher work of art out of that artistic exploration of nature." Sculpture and painting thus emerge from the appearance of mere naturalism. From the fragments of what we see and experience, a holistic image is formed in our minds. The true poetic effect emerges from this synthetic way of looking. The architectural design had to become the focus of observation.
For his part, Georgii, out of his gentler humanity, retracted the rigid severity of the "architectural" into the lyrical, but this taut concept itself, which for Hildebrand had emerged from his personal inclination towards architecture and its stereometric structures, implicitly included the possibility of modifying the forms offered by nature and "abstracting" their naturally proliferating appearances in sculptural equivalents. This formative way of seeing not only concerned the structural, stereometric "construction" of the whole, which Hildebrand was primarily interested in, but also the sculptural surface: The breathing, swelling and sinking fullness of the sculptural cores, the counterpoint between the swelling forms and the hollow forms in the sculptural ensemble, the change and underlining abstraction of the determining weights of mass, which actually bring about the power of existence of a sculptural structure in the surrounding space. Hildebrand did not arrive at his concept of sculpture solely by way of classical antiquity, but also through his intensive study of the sculpture of the Florentine Renaissance, especially that of Donatello and Michelangelo, in whom the animation of the tectonic through the gravity of the sculptural forms and their counterpoints could be impressively studied.
Here, signposts were set up that allowed for newer developments from Hildebrand's firmly established guiding concept. Our sculptor, with all the open-mindedness and joy of discovery of youth, must have instinctively sensed these signs. He also noticed that a whole series of Munich sculptors, much older than he, were moving from the same starting points towards greater freedom. There was Toni Stadler, for example, who, himself a friend and pupil of Georgii, was looking for a stronger lyrical inspiration in the strict sculptural form; there was the whole group of Hahn's pupils, but also more independent talents like Wrampe or Wimmer. They had all stood somehow and at some point under the influence of Hildebrand's radiant power, but sought to move it in the direction of a less classicist, more expressive figural conception that emphasise the mobile, swelling power of the sculptural volumes. It would, of course, be wrong to link the development of the young Mayer directly and selectively to one of the names mentioned. It was his critically observant curiosity that made him recognise this peculiarly congenial panorama of Munich sculpture and graze, so to speak, on the stocks that were nourishing for him. He also digested it in his own unique way. Thus it came about that he grew into the artistic climate and the regional soil of this Munich so naturally that "his whole approach breathes the Isar air even in the spiritual sense", as Gerhard Marcks immediately remarked.
But his work is not exhausted in regionalism. His periscope, guided by curiosity, also discovered the classical, beautifully smoothed and voluminously stretching female figures of Maillol, the heavy masses modelled by Renoir, the portrait heads of Despiau, which seem so close to nature and yet are built up over basic sculptural forms, also the "Pomones" of Marino Marini in their magnificently sculptural, Etruscan swell. His gaze also fell on Marcks from Berlin, on his early works (perhaps the "Roman Boy" from 1935) and probably also on his younger friends Gustav Seitz or Hans Mettel.
It is the image of the human being which ignited Mayer's motival imagination. Throughout his work, the plump figures of girls are often seen in amusing, droll and daring bodily movements: Squatting, tumbling, ducking, high-spirited, strong young women washing their hair or even doing handstands. There is a lot of joyful consent in these peasant ballet dancers, a sensual pleasure in the body, without shame, innocent, rather, because they are full of good-natured humour that likes to push the most daring positions to the grotesque, but never to the obscene. The supple surface, the plastic curvature of the limbs, which are always interwoven into a holistic form, triggers an immense desire to touch and feel the merging forms, comparable (and similarly seductive) to those Far Eastern "flatterers of the hand" that the Mandarin kept in his wide sleeves in order to find secret pleasure in stroking their forms while engrossed in the seriousness of his duties. This urgent, tactile desire to gently touch their forms, which was of course one of the basic sensual impulses of the sculptor himself, also grasps the viewer, puts him on the same sensory level as the sculptor and helps him to experience the structure of the sculpture in a sensual way. The aesthetic pleasure, which usually takes place in more spiritual, more rapt levels, is enriched by the experience of the sensual and allows the viewer to directly relive action and intention. The viewer becomes active himself. However, that "more enraptured" spiritual element is never missing. Mayer often gives titles to his figures that evoke more than merely their physical pose of standing, squatting, or crouching. These titles evoke symbolic metaphors that set poetic ideas in motion. The names were certainly invented after the fact, but they are so apt that the poetic impulse called up in them seems to have fuelled the entire creative process at an unconscious level, at the end of which the verbal metaphor quite naturally gave the sculpture its appropriate name.
Thus, a plump, half-crouching female nude lying on her stomach bears the name "Gäa" (1965). It establishes a connection with the archaic earth goddess of Greek mythology and, through the mythological image, poetises the earthly heaviness of corporeality, that physicality formed from a lump of earth and thus always turned towards the fertile soil, which is so clear and vivid in the sculpture. In 1971, a reclining female nude with raised legs was given the title "Mandrake"; invoking the root- and plant-like suppleness contained in the sculpture with the name of the legendary magic plant, and with it points to the magical interconnectedness of everything vegetative. A charming little female nude with legs drawn in towards the spherical form of her curving body is given the name "The Nest", in which the protection, warmth and fertility of the feminine are evoked beyond the representational depiction. Sometimes the figurative associations that appear in these names allow an essential insight into the nature of the artist's sculptural thinking. Thus a crouching, voluminous female nude is called "Amphora". It suggests the vascularity of the figural appearance and thus points us to a subtle problem that moves the whole of modern sculpture and is also evident in Mayer's thinking.
This problem concerns the production of sculptural volume. It can be achieved - as Rodin did - by applying moulded particles around a core until the desired mass is achieved. This is the modeller's method. Or it can be determined – like Hildebrand, whose idea of volume comes essentially from stone sculpture – by peeling it out of a block in its mass. That is the sculptor's method. But one can also imagine the volume advancing into the space as a form swelling from within, as if swelling bodies, as it were, were pressing the form into the space from within until its outermost tension marks the final boundary. This is the potter's process. His result is the vase form, which grows into its spatial form through pressure from within. This volume swelling from within has a special quality, which every optically sensitive person can experience in its particularity when looking at exquisite Greek vases or in front of the terracottas of Magna Grecia, which were built hollow in their prototypes and pressed out of the hollow moulds (the negative of the models) in their final reproductions.
Achieving this special quality of the form swelling from within is an important concern of sculpture in general. It prompted sculptors such as Gerhard Marcks for years, or Ewald Mataré again and again, to put aside the tools of their sculptural trade and to form vessels freehand or on the potter's wheel, in order to physically experience the swelling power of the volume from within and to be able to reproduce it actively in their sculptures. An anecdote that Gerhard Marcks told me and that Toni Stadler confirmed may clarify this process, which is somewhat difficult for the layman to understand. Both had met the young Italian sculptor Mirko Basaldella in Rome in 1932 and had watched in amazement as Mirko, with all the manual dexterity of the Italians, pressed a small figure out of a lump of plasticine as a negative form inside the plasticine lump, using only the tactile sensation of the hand. When he poured out the truly "blindly" felt negative form, the positive plastic volume of the poured out form showed the "vase-like" quality, the pressing fullness of the plastic form stretched from within. Both sculptors never forgot this experience. Even in 1948, Marcks' "Eva" clearly shows the intention to make the life-size modelled figure resemble this vascularity. And Toni Stadler, even in his old age, constantly mused about the form swelling from within. I remember how Stadler, to everyone's horror, sawed apart his famous "Dog", which was already modelled and cast in bronze, one day and drove the bronze outwards from the inside with a sledgehammer in order to achieve that swelling power, whereby he incidentally also understood, in his poetic way, the resounding sound of the bronze maltreated with the hammer as a useful source of inspiration. Finally, his friend, the Munich sculptor and bronze caster Heiner Kirchner, found a suitable and easy-to-handle material to achieve that swell: the heated wax plate, which could easily be pressed from the inside out and assembled from the individual pieces to form the figure.
This brief digression is only intended to point out the reflective paths in pictorial thinking traced by the name "Amphora", which Mayer gave to his female nude figure. All his figures show this "vessel-like" quality, the form swelling from within, the supple rise and fall of the volume, which rounds off without interruptions through scaffold-like geometric subdivisions to form a continuously flowing whole, like the surface of a bulbous vessel. This intention determines the way he deals with his material. He is much less a "sculptor" than a "modeller". His preferred materials are clay and bronze. Stone is rare. It only appears in more decorative contexts: In public memorials or in ecclesiastical commissions, i.e. for external reasons.
Clay and bronze most readily permit the play of swelling volumes in a uniformly expanding mass. The figurative sculpture, with all its sensual presence, is at the same time always an independent, comparatively "abstract" piece of sculpture, which self-willedly asserts itself within space, defines it, takes possession of it and makes its intangibility "comprehensible" in the literal sense of the word. Everything flat is thoroughly eradicated in the swelling of the holistic form, including the eurythmic play of the linear and decorative elements, even in the naturalistic appearance of the implied outlines of the limbs. The limbs, too, are to become parts of a unified plastic mass. Thus he slurs the joints or thickens the ankles conspicuously according to the flow of the form. All these pictorial manipulations aim at the wholeness of the "piece of sculpture", which then also asserts itself in the resulting natural form.
It is therefore a unified formal creative will, which I have called "abstract" only for reasons of simpler understanding, that explores the image of nature and, responding to it, develops the counter-image that corresponds to it. He brings about the astonishingly unacademic aspect of this family of figures that seems so close to nature. It expresses itself most strikingly in the exaggeration of the volumes given in the image of nature. It is precisely the swelling forms of the young female body - thighs and buttocks, breasts and back - that provoke him to exaggeration. Here he takes hold courageously and exaggerates courageously. It is not without reason that the plump, youthful female nude is his favourite motif. But it is not only the joyful sensuality, which certainly plays its part as an impulse, but a certain formal, sculptural idea that prompts him to these exaggerations. These massive forms are the decisive weights from which the interplay of the sculptural volumes is composed, powerful accents and striking call signs which, through a combination of harmony and disturbance, only truly produce the composition in the balance of the whole as a sculptural event.
In the midst of this seemingly playful and yet so thoughtfully rehearsed preoccupation with his "young Munich witches", he created a strangely obligatory figure that can be considered truly exemplary of his sculptural intention. In conclusion, he gave it the resonant name "Olympia Triumphans". It was originally created in the course of his preoccupation with the bodies of girls performing all kinds of capers, as a small figure standing on its hands. In the years 1971-73, in the Olympic enthusiasm of Munich during that time, it grew into the much larger-than-life statue that today stands as a mighty emblem on the hill of the park surrounding the Munich sports stadiums. It figuratively depicts a powerful athlete in a handstand on mighty, columnar arms with legs spread apart, towering against the sky like a call sign and as an almost "abstract" cipher. In the monumentality of this figure, all the peculiarities that we tried to make clear above attain immediate vividness. We recognise the exaggerated bodily forms as the swelling power of sculptural volumes, which precisely in their exaggeration demonstrate an abstracting vision that translates the suggestions of nature into independent sculptural forms. The taut curvature of the large breasts, which keeps the sphere of the head in balance, and above it the powerful projection of the pelvis and thighs correspond with one another and bring about the artistic equilibristics in the interplay of heavy moulded masses. These, however, are held together by a comprehensive movement that unites all the details in the overarching form, as in an all-embracing arabesque. Now the volumes of the mass enter into a flowing rapport with one another and draw out a grandly designed, ornamentally emblematic structure in which the heaviness facing the earth becomes light and rises upwards in equilibrium as a soaring winged form and unexpectedly celebrates the light beating of its wings against all probability. In the wholeness of the overall form, resulting from the interaction of the volumes, as in the swelling power of these volumes themselves, which grows from within, we will easily recognise that "vascularity", the formal tension of the vase, the special quality of which we just described. It shows an indissoluble interplay between the description of nature and the free development of the compositional interplay of forms, which succeeds in vividly demonstrating the strongest pole of the fullness of existence experienced. The woman's body is transformed into an independent pictorial cipher, which contains all aspects of a naturalistic depiction, but gains its expressive power (distant image) from the arrangement of pure forms. We can certainly regard the imposing figure of the "Olympia Triumphans" as a central point in Mayer's development.I said at the beginning that the temporal unfolding of his work would be difficult to trace. Everything is always "somehow" present at the same time and what has already been created is still "somehow" present. Since he - a freelance artist since 1954 - modelled his life-size "Standing Figure" in the same year, his basic idea of sculpture has changed only slightly. It may have become richer, more agitated, freer, but the initial basic pattern has been retained throughout. The long series of female nudes shows this very clearly.However, his portrait heads, which repeatedly accompany the depictions of the figures, are also difficult to place in a developmental series. I would not trust myself to date one of these portraits correctly right away. They characterise the sitter with precision, but always allow something typical to shine through behind the characteristic, which permeates the formal structure evenly and always reveals something of the author. They display the same spatially expanding massiveness, understand and emphasise the curves and projections in the individual face as bulges from the sculptural core, avoid flatness, sharpen the edges and transform the striking outlines, with which the characteristics of a face can be comparatively easily drawn out, into sculptural curves. All characteristic detail is integrated into a uniform, powerful mass. Even Mayer's depiction of the face of the pugnacious philosopher and writer Ernst Bloch, furrowed by life and formed in an extremely distinctive way, bears a striking resemblance to him and is amazingly characteristic, but also fits into this basic sculptural conception. Before it becomes a portrait of the philosopher, it is first of all a piece of sculpture developed from a certain sculptural idea: One thing interlocks with another.
However, one outstanding event within this otherwise restrained, continuous development should be noted in particular: The emergence and design of the robed figure. It, too, was carefully designed and prepared in a long series of experiments with female nudes and in the small format of the two statuettes of "Undressing Figure" from 1963. But it is only hinted at in a very restrained way; in one statuette the shirt still completely adapts to the shape of the body, in the other it forms a moulded ball around the neck, which supports the pulling arms embracing the head to form a ring-like base. In 1982, the same motif is found in a life-size bronze, the "Susanna". In it, however, the actual sculptural problem, the dialectic between core and enveloping form, has already been precisely posed and solved. The shirt pulled over the head stands in clear contrast to the core form of the naked body; its design, which allows the outlines of the face and arms to shine through vaguely, plays its own game as an enveloping form that transforms the pulling and tensing forces of the arms and cloth into a sculptural diagram. Such exciting dialectics carry the artistry of the figure in its double appearance as core and shell. This solution did not come about by chance. Already in 1978/79 the sculptor was confronted with the problem of the robed figure with a certain suddenness. It arose with the larger-than-life bronze figure of "St. Francis", who is today placed as a free-standing figure and messenger of peace on a small forecourt in front of the Postscheckamt in Sonnenstraße in Munich. The figure shows the youthful itinerant friar in a heavy hair shirt and bare feet on his march to a new, random preaching place, be it a forest clearing with a flock of birds, a group of beggars in an open field or a gathering of people in a marketplace in some Umbrian village. Very lonely, very wistful, smiling pensively and lost in thought, he strides along on large feet, his big hands behind his back, carried by his mission, marching vigorously on. A pair of fluttering doves accompany him as a sign of peace and fraternal understanding between all creatures. It is very touching to meet this wanderer in his felted robe on the busy city street.
But it is precisely the garment that gives the figure its sculptural power and its special, poetic aura. Stiff, heavy and obstructive, it sets the earthly counterpoint to the monk inspired by the otherworldly – a protective cloak, monk's habit and handicap all in one. It encapsulates the moving, masculine body, its stiff heaviness hinders the energetic step and yet it is to be worn as a burdensome suit of armour, as it were the uniform of the warrior of God, which in its oppressive poverty nevertheless only testifies to his bondage to the Almighty.
This beautiful poetic content is essentially brought about by the formal arrangement, precisely by that in this case aggressive dialectic between enveloping and core form, which actually brings about the expression of content and "makes an image" out of it. Only the head of the saint peering out of this gorget-like armour makes the veiled body, the core form, more clearly perceptible. At the bottom, the stiff hem of the cloak flaps back to reveal a section of the powerfully striding legs. Seen from the side, the cloak, which is attached to the shoulders and simplifies the outline, forms a large bulge that presses on the body like a heavy weight, rests on the fragile, transparent standing zone of the feet and gives it that peculiar dragging quality that adds the ritardando of great toil to the energetic step. In the rear view, the gesture of the hands clasped behind the back lifts up the heavy hem of the cloak and allows a part of the garment to emerge from under its folds, and the scramble of the resulting array of forms made up of various rhythmic shell-like shapes smoothly traces the striding movement and allows the form of the body underneath to clearly shine through. Since this is a work of art, one may permit a poetic, musical comparison: It is out through the dully repeated "basso continuo" of the heavy volumes of the mantle that the living song intoned by the translucent forms of the bodily core penetrates from within.
The problem of the monumental robed figure arises once again in the case of the larger-than-life bronze statue of the reformer Martin Luther from 1983, which stands in front of the St. Andrew's Church in Weissenburg in Middle Franconia. Here, the blocky shape of the mantle reinforces the steadfast standing of the manly Protestant who, set up on a narrow paved path, confronts visitors to the church like an obstructive barricade and demonstratively shows his giant Bible as a sign of the confessing church: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise! A comment seems appropriate to me here. "Luther", "St. Francis", but also the larger-than-life figure of "Orpheus", created as early as 1962, show a peculiar closeness to characteristic physical features of the sculptor himself. Following this thought further, one even believes to recognise a chronological sequence in their changing ages: From the youthful, singing "Orpheus" to the "Francis" striding against all errors, to the truly confessed masculinity of "Luther". At the beginning, I already indicated that reflections of the artist's "Pyknical" physique and bodily gestures could also be observed in the physical habitus of the moving female nudes. They become even clearer in the large still images. It seems to me that this self-identification of artist and work is a remarkable sign of the agreement between his world of figures and his entire creative activity, which encompasses the whole human being down to his physicality. His figures vividly show their creator's hands-on, masculine joie de vivre, which is so happily paired with his astonished curiosity about the phenomena of nature. A feeling for being and for life, curious desire and amazement at the abundance of what naturally exists become one in the figures. They are the answers in form to the artist's own feelings about life.
It corresponds to the sculptor's urge, equally directed towards tradition and constant presence, to bring the emerging problem back into his familiar iconography after the accomplished monumental robed figures. Already the large, leaping Dionysian Bacchante of 1980/81, who with her grapes pressed under her breasts seems to have sprung from a cheerfully noisy procession of Bacchus – and to whom he gave the burlesque title "Palatina Bacchabunda" – shows in heightened form the constant survival of his figure, the young, powerfully alive female nude, representative of his own bucolic sense of life. Thus, in his most recent works, he brings back into his familiar circle of figures the dialectic of enveloping and core forms, which he so urgently confronted in the robed figures. This resulted in 1982 in "Susanna", who pulls her shirt over her head, with its contrast between the naked and the veiled, and finally in 1984 in "Große Bukolika", which found its location in a patch of greenery at the foot of a Munich bridge over the River Isar. This plump, squatting figure of a girl, dozing in a dreamy mass, the robe that barely conceals her upper body tying the details together into an encompassing form, as plumply sexual as the fruit of the pomegranate spilling out of its skin, extends a sisterly greeting to the often burlesque earlier female figures. She re-enters their family circle as the last arrival and shows its persistent presence, which allows no figure to leave it for reasons of temporal development or momentary avant-garde ideas, in order to remain present in the circle of figures surrounding the artist's imagination and to expand their family, but never destroy it. The panels and their arrangement give a clearer view of this close association of ideas than my words. This is the basis of the growth from which this sculptural work grew and will continue to grow.
Werner Haftmann
Martin Mayer
Callwey Verlag, München, 1988