Walter Moroder
∗1963, Italy
lives and works in Ortisei, Italy
Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture by Walter Moroder will never forget it: the artist creates figures of graceful appearance, they radiate a tenderness and dignity whose intensity is hard to resist. Slender, predominantly female figures characterise his sculptural work. They are life-size and of reduced form, very upright and slender, rather static in posture. Moroder prefers Swiss pine, the figures are mostly painted, the eyes made of glass. In the reception of his work, it is emphasised that the life-size sculptures, for all their modernity, are in the tradition of South Tyrolean carving, but at the same time are reminiscent of the formal language of ancient Egyptian pictorial art. Moroder creates sensitive, witty portraits, sensitive and vulnerable, at the same time unapproachable and distant, the features collected and yet not tense, archaic and yet modern, auratic and timeless. The viewer will not see all this in the pedestrian zone. The work of Walter Moroder is surprising. The female figures have become his "trademark", and yet he has resisted the temptation to adapt them for public space. A carved wooden nude from 1985 (an academy work) was placed in a casing and cast in dark grey concrete so that nothing of the sculpture is visible. At the same time, he poured an exactly identical concrete block without the sculpture inside. Both blocks, worked to great perfection, can be seen in the pedestrian zone; the viewer is left in the dark as to which of the two hides the wooden sculpture. The four-ton monoliths have something indestructible about them; art vandals will have a hard time with them - a thought that certainly played a role in the conception of the work. Concrete was also deliberately chosen because this (building) material has a strong connection to the Val Gardena. Moroder makes the sculpture disappear and yet appear present, it is present, indeed preserved for eternity, but at the same time it remains hidden from the eye. The work is a wonderful reflection on the creative process (of course one has to think of Michelangelo's saying that the sculpture is already there, one only has to recognise and uncover it) and on one's own artistic development (the view of a work from 1985 with the eyes of 2012).
Ha partecipato a:
