Gunter Damisch :
Weltwegbetrachter

Gunter Damisch completed a significant work in open countryside as his contribution to the 2007 exhibition 'Feuer & Erde' (Fire and Earth). The artists chose the topographically exciting and highly visible Hochkogel mountain in the Mostviertel, which is also an emotionally charged location in his biography.
He entitled the work, which he created specially for the location, Weltwegbetrachter (World Path Observer) due to its shape and the vantage point that it offers. The seven metre tall sculpture is the product of a complex technical process, and made of flotsam from the river Ybbs shaped in wax and tree trunks cast in bronze at the Loderer foundry in Feldbach. On closer inspection of the impressive large-scale sculpture, a person, an 'observer', is to be discerned growing out of the very top of the oval, almost pear-shaped overall volume in its wood-like figure-populated convolutions — the head of which has a smaller 'observer' emerging from it. A human being as occupant and observer of the micro- and macro-world is conveyed symbolically as a creature that essentially experiences the world through sight. The title alludes to the diversity and wealth of possibilities of being in the world, of living in it and drawing from it for one's own life. From a distance the sculpture creates the impression of a large weather-beaten tree. Gunter Damisch shows, too, that for him nature (the countryside) provides a major and irreplaceable source of inspiration for his art. "For the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non. The artist is a man, himself nature and part of nature in natural space." (Paul Klee).
(Carl Aigner)