‘It has to be steel!’ For Georg-Friedrich Wolf, an apodictic credo. His fascination with this material is based on its properties, which constantly challenge the artist’s diverse interests. On the one hand, steel, with its specific characteristics, demands a keen sense of observation and a love of experimentation from the artist. On the other hand, it requires the ability to wring deformations out of the metal through unusual forging processes, so that it takes shape.

Wolf calls these figures forged from the material “Iron Age”. Titled after Auguste Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais”, Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of “Death in Venice”, or Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde”, they speak of the lively sixty-one-year-old artist’s cultural affinities. Piquant: He is even capable of injecting humour and eroticism into a form wrenched forcefully from steel, when, for example, the depiction of Tristan and Isolde – reduced to two fragments with buttocks and vulva – brings the narrative to the point. 

A second cycle of works begins with “The Legacy of Prometheus”, who brought fire to mankind, making it possible to work iron. The cycle consists of assemblages of found objects such as ship and aircraft propellers and other scrap metal. In this way, Wolf tells the story of human progress – the quest for knowledge and the overcoming of boundaries – but also of power and destruction.  

Wolf titles his works after figures from Greek mythology who symbolise qualities such as discovery, responsibility, and courage. With his sculpture entitled “Odyssey” – a shipwreck built with the help of refugees and artistically reminiscent of Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” – he has created a monument to the many deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean. This work, like all those conceived for public spaces, bears witness to Wolf’s political manifesto. He wants to help shape the polis and use art to encourage society to acquire its own knowl-edge and rethink the future with imagination. 

In “The Poetry of Data”, Wolf explores highly topical forms of communication, such as the enigmatic QR codes that, realised in steel, deny access to content. In the age of coded messages and the conquest of space, Wolf has engraved the most important discoveries of mankind, such as the number Pi or the formulae of electrodynamics and thermodynamics, on a gold stele. A sanctuary of coded messages from our culture for future inhabitants of the world.