o.T. (1976) / untitled (1976)

Erich Reusch began to design abstract sculptures for public space as early as the 1950s. He called them “decentralised sculptures” because they were less about the condensed sculptural form than about a definition of space. This made the sculptor, who lived in Neuenrade-Blintrop, one of the pioneers of postwar art in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1976 he donated a sculpture characteristic of his work to the city where he had lived and worked for so long. Today it is located in the park of the Villa am Wall, now a socio-cultural centre. It consists of a flat steel slab standing on a base plate, straight and flush with the base plate on one side, irregular and bent almost in a semi-circle like a torn sheet of paper or a flag on the other. The sculpture thus generates a movement from the fixed, geometrical to the flowing form. It cuts into space, like a knife on one side, like organic matter on the other, and manages to define it by its presence.

www.erich-reusch.de