2024-01-22 11:53:07
Of course, the golden onion dome should not be missing. Just like the jumbled checkerboard patterns, the meandering mosaic bands and the ceramic columns that look like stacked rings and vases. Already seen everything. And yet the new Hundertwasser Art Center is unique – simply because it is located in New Zealand, the controversial eccentric’s adopted homeland.
In 1973, Friedrich Stowasser, as he was called when he was born in Vienna in 1928, traveled to the islands on the other side of the world for the first time to exhibit his works. He liked them so much that three years later he came sailing on his yacht Rainy Day and bought a run-down dairy farm in the Kaurinui Valley near the Bay of Islands. He often painted naked on his boat, preferably in the rain. “Here he was able to live unrecognized and in peace,” says Richard Smart. The carpenter, 63, became Hundertwasser’s assistant and friend. When he died of a heart attack on a cruise ship off Australia in 2000, Smart brought the body to Kaurinui and buried it under a tulip tree in the Garden of the Happy Dead.
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