Frank Maibier: Ornamente

On a square ground plan, eight elements of different heights and colours are stacked at equal angles to form a tall tower. The artist Frank Maibier, who was born in 1959 in Werneuchen near Berlin and lives in Chemnitz, documented the formal and colourful models for the sculpture Ornamente on forays through the eight villages in the municipality of Lichtenau. As a sculptural homage to the cheerful stylistic pluralism of garden fences and their owners, Maibier's sculpture quotes their ornaments and has them realised by a master locksmith from the municipality. Maibier, who often explores the limits of stability and balance in his sculptures, installations and works on paper in order to question the principles of material laws and norms in both a concrete and figurative sense, dedicates his sculpture to Lichtenau's local spirit of resistance to the boredom of everyday objects.

Property boundaries made of metal remnants are among the secret trademarks of private everyday culture in East Germany and Eastern Europe. They testify to the ingenuity with which the lack of products from the former socialist planned economy was compensated for by the reuse and further utilisation of leftovers, often from state-owned enterprises in the private sector. With imagination and skill, garden fences with stylised plant tendrils, concrete-abstract patterns, underwater scenes or bouquets of flowers were created from punched slugs, ironwork, cogwheels or brake discs. With their richness of form, they can still hold their own today against the lack of aesthetics of DIN-standardised fence irons from the DIY store and confidently transport their stubbornness into our present day.

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)