Roter Hase / Red Hare

The hare, whose design is based on a plasticine figure by the artist’s daughter, is enthroned – equally demonic and ridiculous – like a “drop sculpture” on a concrete “circular thickener” in the park on the grounds of the former Lohberg mine. The disconcerting effect of this sculpture is caused mainly by the fact that the huge, bloated, wrinkled and unstable body of this hare-human-hybrid definitely seems “improvable” but was nonetheless painted in a high-gloss, signal-red finish like one of the perfectly reproduced giant objects of an American pop artist. In this context, the hare can definitely be interpreted as a humorous signal heralding a new (better?) age, a new beginning.

Apart from using a relic of the industrial past as a pedestal, the sculpture makes no reference in form or content to its site, today’s “Bergpark Lohberg,” a park with a creative quarter in which relics of its industrial past have remained visible: It is located in the northern part of the former mine, where the timber and material yards, coal preparation as well as loading docks and a freight yard used to be. The “circular thickener” itself is reminiscent of a sedimentation tank and had a similar function, namely purifying water. A walkway runs around the empty basin at whose centre the larger-than-life hare is installed. In the immediate vicinity is the concrete building of the flotation sludge thickener which, comparable to a coffee filter, separated fine sediments from water. The sculpture, which also exists as a gargoyle in a bronze version, found its way here as part of the project “Choreographie einer Landschaft” (Choreography of a Landscape), designed to revive the grounds of the disused mine. In this instance, the artist produced it with a fibreglass laminated polystyrene core covered in a weather-resistant coating in signal-red “flip flop” varnish, which also provides the greatest possible contrast to a rather grey-green environment.

More on this:
Kunstwerke im öffentlichen Raum von Dinslaken

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