St. Gereon

The artist Iskender Yediler by no means works only in stone, as his training with the sculptor Ulrich Rückriem might suggest. On the contrary, a large group of his works consists of inflatable sculptures, while Yediler has also created cast aluminium and fibreglass sculptures. Starting in 2002, though, he has produced a group of granite sculptures for public spaces which includes Cassius and Florentius in front of the Bonn Minster, a St. Benno sculpture in front of St. Benno’s Church in Munich, St. Blasius in front of the cathedral of the former Benedictine Abbey of St. Blasien in the High Black Forest and, in this case, St. Gereon in front of St. Gereon church in Cologne. All of them show larger-than-life heads of saints which – as if detached from a huge figure and left on the site by chance – lie directly on the ground without a pedestal. As the idealised representations made of smoothly polished stone are also placed in the context of the churches dedicated to the respective saints, these strangely fragmented images seem to comprise both the suprahuman exaltation of the martyrs and a reminder of the transience of their fame.

According to legend, Gereon (around 207-304) was an officer of the Theban Legion who was decapitated near Cologne for his Christian faith and his refusal to take part in the persecution of Christians.