Since July 1993 it has been one of the most striking meeting points in Esens city centre: the coin sculpture at the southern end of Steinstrasse. The "round sculpture" by the artist Karl-Ludwig Böke from Leer is reminiscent of the former mint that once stood nearby. It contains a bronze coin relief with the portrait of Princess Christine Charlotte, who ruled East Frisia from 1665 to 1690, on the front. On the back are the Württemberg and East Frisian coats of arms and the initials of the Esens mint master B. H. (Borchart Hartmann, active from 1663 to 1688). The original was minted in 1685 as a representative thaler for the princess, on the occasion of her 20-year reign as guardian of her son Christian Eberhard.
The round sculpture for the monument, which is intended to commemorate the time when Esens was also a mint (1628 to 1746), is a geometric construction. The memorial thaler has a diameter of a good meter, stands dynamically on its edge - but still upright. The artist interprets it as if the thaler were rolling into the world. The original of this oversized thaler was struck and minted in the Esens mint in 1685.
The bronze sculpture of the coin monument is about two and a half meters high and stands on a 50 centimeter high base. With his choice of materials, the artist wanted to move away from cold chrome-nickel steel. Bronze is a warm, grippy material. Circles and squares determine the spatial structure of the work of art. The viewer is suggested to the work processes of coin minting in the past, for example the punching of the rounds. The Lower Saxony Savings Bank Foundation and the Wittmund District Savings Bank commissioned this work of art. The call for entries at the art colleges in Bremen, Braunschweig and Hanover as well as in several art magazines resulted in a good 600 inquiries and ultimately over a hundred applications and 40 models in the Esens town hall. Karl-Ludwig Böke was among them. The coin sculpture was cast and assembled in the Oldenburg art foundry Dirk Harms. The sculptor Karl-Ludwig Böke created the forms for his round space sculpture in the original dimensions. The model, made from a particularly hard special mass, was pressed into resin-bound molding sand. This created the negative mold required for the casting process. This was placed in the casting box, closed and provided with funnel-shaped openings through which the liquid metal entered the coin mold at the signal of the foundry master.
In the foundry, the specialists heated the metal, delivered as bronze bars from a foundry in Nuremberg, in the crucible furnace to around 1400 degrees and thus melted it. It took several hours for the mass to reach the necessary degree of fluidity under the oil fire. The actual casting process, however, was completed in a few seconds: 163 kilos of bronze had flowed into the coin mold and hardened in around two hours. The box could then be opened and the molding sand knocked off. After cleaning the surfaces, burrs and edges were finely sanded and the final chasing work was carried out.
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