Sylvia Hagen. Spuren: Bronze – Ton – Papier

For over five decades, Sylvia Hagen has created bronzes, terracotta figures, charcoal drawings and gouaches, as well as other works of art. They are characterised by an impressive combination of powerfulness and assertiveness, and simultaneous openness. Her creative works always focus on the human body, which is sometimes shown in quiet repose, and sometimes in inner conflict. Nevertheless, Hagen always communicates a positive image of the human form.

Although her works do reveal Sylvia Hagen's inner artistic energy, they always just hint at it. Not least, she draws this energy from her chosen home's landscape, the Oderbruch region. Born in Treuenbrietzen, a small town to the south-west of Berlin, she started to study medicine in Berlin, which may have contributed to the anthropological aspects of her work. She left university without graduating, became an artist and moved to the Oderbruch region with her husband Werner Stötzer in 1981.

Hagen has successfully developed a unique artistic signature. The raw material does not conceal the creation process; the sculptures reveal the way they were made. Nothing is varnished, glossed over. The material is permitted to work, to oxidise; time leaves its marks on the surfaces, thereby becoming part of the works of art. Hagen builds her bodies up, destroys them again, and starts anew. Her process is an ongoing search for and approach to the form, a dance on the fine line between objectivism and abstraction.

In her so far most extensive solo exhibition at Neuhardenberg Castle, Sylvia Hagen will be showing sculptures, as well as paper works, from the past five decades.