Skulptur für einen Baum / Sculpture for a Tree

Klaus Simon is a sculptor who regards wood not as a material, but as a tree or part of one and thus a living creature and individual. He often works with diseased, uprooted or dead trees, whose “life story” becomes part of the artwork, thus allowing the tree to live on. “Skulptur für einen Baum” is a bronze cast of a piece of wood from a 350-year-old diseased northern German elm tree. A saw was used to produce the double, connected, slightly irregular shape of a cross. While one of the crosses is solid, the other has a hole at the centre of the intersection that was obviously already there in the piece of wood. The bronze sculpture cast from this finds its place under the remains of a gnarly old mulberry tree that was treated by a tree surgeon and sprouted again. In this combination, the tree can also be perceived as a sculptural element, even if it still has some leaf-bearing branches.
Art and nature form a close, almost symbiotic relationship in this work. Klaus Simon’s bronze sculpture belongs to a group of eight site-specific sculptures in Kant Park which the then director of the museum, Prof. Christoph Brockhaus, exhibited with sculptures from the collection under the title “Skulptur der Zweiten Moderne” (Sculpture of the Second Modern Age) in 1990 with the intention of displaying them permanently in Kant Park afterwards. Klaus Simon’s photos and drawings of the sculpture are in the collection of the Lehmbruck Museum.