Leo Schatzl
:
Grosses Zwiebelchen
Back
Information
Grosses Zwiebelchen (Large Little Onion) is the tongue-in-cheek title of the orange light object on the roundabout of the community known locally as 'Zwiebeldorf' (Onion Village). It is a 6.5 metre tall sheet metal, enamel and glass sculpture in the shape of a stylised onion. At the top of its long stem is a light that represents the onion flower.
Unterstinkenbrunn local council commissioned Leo Schatzl with the artistic design of the new roundabout at the approach to the community. The result is a 6.5 metre high metal sculpture in the stylised shape of a vast onion with a long stem, on the tip of which there is alight as a flower. The situation of the onion sculpture as an oversized icon for the preservation of local culture adopts a playful distance to the current trend for displaying public art on roundabouts. The title of the work Grosses Zwiebelchen (Giant Little Onion) flirts with the cultural trademark of the community known as 'onion village', and alludes with irony to the self-reflective potential of the sculpture. The aesthetics of the sculpture's material is not intended to engage with the cultural emphasis on the onion as a natural product but primarily with the location of the sculpture: Steel sheeting, enamel and glass integrate the passing cars on the road. So too, the colour — an intense orange — distances itself from the natural colour of an onion, using the signal impact of a traffic sign instead. Without making a fixed statement, the Large Little Onion experiments with different arenas of significance by overlaying cultural forms from diverging contexts. Inspired by the onion towers of baroque churches, based on the buoy as a fixed orientation mark and the Oriental lantern as a source of light, the object mixes traditional local culture with the migration of forms.
(Ramón Reichert)
Images (7)
Videos (1)
