Yggdrasil – Nocturnal Ride through the Republic

Beautiful to look at from all sides.

Ygdrasil - night ride through the Republic, 2003-2014, 375 x 85 x 120 cm, red Maulbronner Stubensandstein, Hans Daniel Sailer."Hans Daniel Sailer preferred to use stones that still belong to nature for his work. That sounds mysterious, but it has concrete connections to the sculptor's self-image as an artist. While in marble, for example, the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" that the Evoking ancient and classicist aesthetics, Sailer prefers sandstone, while tradition is less fixed and in the raw state of pure understanding and even more so evades aesthetic reason. Myths and fairy tales are among the sources of inspiration, but Etruscan, Celtic and Germanic legends also flow into the artist's world of images, and he is also no stranger to the animistic understanding of Africa's nature.
In this context, the sculpture "Ygdrasil - Night Ride through the Republic" was created in 2002 on the occasion of the sculpture project "EigenArt - Art and Nature on Venusberg", which was adopted in a slightly modified form for the SCULPTOURA. The monolithic stone resembles a Celtic menhir and shows cipher-like figures, geometric and free forms, some of which seem to be taken from cave paintings or evoke archaic symbols and mysteriously foreign symbols. The former Hrdlicka student Hans Daniel Sailer strives to understand the different cultural layers as a unity both in his living environment - he lives and works in an old water mill - and in his plastic imagery. A golden sun (or moon) disc shines representatively at the tip of the "Ygdrasil" stone, which tapers upwards, and the red hands stretch towards it: the world of gods and men, art and nature become one. Ygdrasil refers to the Nordic legend of the world ash, a tree with multiple lives that connects heaven and earth, past and future."
Source: schoenbuch-heckengaeu.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Katalog_Entwurf_SCULPTOURA_112023.pdf

Interesting to look at this sculpture, made of wonderful red sandstone 😊