With the “Work of the Week” the “Freie Presse” presents art in public space. Today: Bronze bust “Ernst Dagobert Kaltofen” by Volker Beyer in Langenau (2010).
Although many men (and only a few women) have carved in the Ore Mountains over the centuries, the number of carvers known by name is limited. One of the most famous, however, is Ernst Dagobert Kaltofen from Langenau near Brand-Erbisdorf.
The painter and sculptor Volker Beyer, who also lives in Langenau, erected a small monument to him there. In the community cemetery, a bronze cast on a wooden base, inscribed with Kaltofen’s name and biographical data, commemorates the miner and carver, his preferred tool, whose work is known far beyond the Ore Mountains.
Ernst Dagobert Kaltofen was born on December 23, 1841 in Oberlangenau. Although slightly disabled in one leg, he really wanted to be a miner and worked in the Himmelsfürst mine and other mining locations. Since he liked to draw and carve even as a small boy, he successfully applied for a job with a master wood sculptor in Dresden in 1871. Around 1900 he became a self-employed carver and since then has created works of some considerable dimensions. One of his most famous works is the peace pulpit in the Langenau church, a multi-part relief that Kaltofen began in 1917, even before the end of the First World War, and which expresses the longing for peace of the people of that time. There is nothing heroic about the richly figured panels depicting miners, farmers, farm laborers and soldiers returning home; it is not about victory or submission, but solely about the hope for peace. The pulpit deserves its own “work of the week”. Kaltofen very often carved reliefs with an amazing depth effect – although sometimes only a few centimeters thick. Some can be admired in the Dresden Museum for Saxon Folk Art, but also in the Ore Mountain Museum in Annaberg-Buchholz and in the City and Mining Museum in Freiberg.
As in other works, Ernst Kaltofen has immortalized himself (with his wife) in a somewhat offbeat scene in the Peace Pulpit. He was well aware of his qualities. This is also expressed in Volker Beyer’s bronze sculpture, which shows a strong, self-confident man with a mustache who knows how to use his tools, clapper and chisel. A rough life is reflected in the facial features as well as the rough mountains and an open, attentive look.
This connects Ernst Kaltofen with Volker Beyer, for whom the portrait bust is not so typical. Born in 1951 in Bannewitz near Dresden, Volker Beyer completed professional training as a decorative painter before he studied painting and graphics in evening classes from 1972 to 1975, then wood design from 1979 to 1982 in Schneeberg. He worked in the Erzgebirge wood art industry, as a playground designer, furniture restorer; In 1985 he became a freelance artist. In 1989 he moved with his family to Langenau, where he lives and works on the premises of a former carpentry shop. His teachers and artistic companions, to whom he is still grateful today, include Carl-Heinz Westenburger, Gerald Sippel, Peter üpfel, Hans Brockhage, Günter Hofmann, Karl Clauss Dietel and Hans Hess.
The multitude of these very different influences, the thorough training and his talent shape the artistic work of Volker Beyer, which includes small and large sculptures, paintings, graphics, assemblages and collages. It often moves on the edge of the representational – there, where it is just recognizable in fragments, but almost dissolves into the unrecognizable, free, supernatural and supernatural. As much as Volker Beyer is at peace and lives with nature, which is allowed to spread out on the family property and is not forced into an artificial discipline by regular lawn mowing, there is movement and change in his works. In the wooden sculptures, this arises from a dialectical alternation of positive and negative, concave and convex forms that stand in an exciting relationship to one another, argue with one another, protect one another, complement one another.
In the graphics and paintings, the world seems as confused as it is in reality. “It was a strange place, it was different from all villages… it was as if someone had stirred a very old village, a very dirty small town and a very sinister factory together and then dumped it on the ground between three mountains.” This is how Werner Bräunig describes a not so fictitious Erzgebirge settlement in his wonderful novel “Fairground” – and that’s how Volker Beyer’s pictures of the Erzgebirge appear. Because his art distinguishes what Bräunig describes: the haphazard nature of the mountains, this whole, cursed, beautiful story of declines and upswings, of pasts, present and future, this mixture of victories and defeats, of forgetting and remembering, staying and leaving. The mixture of inspired art and solidly practiced craftsmanship. All of this can also be found in Volker Beyer’s works, regardless of whether they are paintings or sculptures.