With the “Work of the Week” the “Freie Presse” presents art in public space. Today: The bronze sculpture “Sinnende” by Sabina Grzimek in Chemnitz (1977).
She seems to have been sitting there for a long time, the “sensual end”, in front of the theater in Chemnitz. Weathered bronze on mossy panels. Larger than life, legs crossed, head supported in left hand. She sits there naked and defenseless, musing with her senses. And she doesn’t seem very happy. Rather, she has aged a little, the arms are emaciated, the great excitement of youth has evaporated.
food for thought
The sculpture from the Berlin district art exhibition was bought by the city of Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1977 and initially stood in the Stadthallenpark before it was placed in the entrance area for the opening of the new theater in 1980. There, in the theater, and in the country whose reality the theater was very critical of at the time, there was plenty of food for the mind and for the senses. “Sense” – that’s something different, it’s more than just thinking, it’s much more than pondering. It has to do with the senses and the meaning, with the meaning of life ultimately. “The meaning of life lies in the fact that it ends”, Franz Kafka wrote, finitude is the meaning of life.
Then as now, there were and still are enough reasons to ponder whether we will still be able to make the earth a better place for everyone in this finite life. At the end of the 1970s, when the Berlin sculptor Sabina Grzimek created the sculpture, that was the leaden time in the GDR, in which the country, according to its leaders, always on the way to the top of the world, was reeling towards its downfall, according to its leaders, who were unable and unwilling to reform . As relentlessly and stubbornly as the self-proclaimed “party and state leadership” stuck to its ideologically narrow, authoritarian course, the art that had long been preparing people for freedom and democracy was just as attentive and critical. But a success of these efforts was not foreseeable when the “Sensernende” found her place in front of the theater musing, thinking and feeling. It would therefore fit well on the cover of the narrow, melancholic book “Why Thinking Makes Sad” by the French literary scholar George Steiner.
reasons for being sad
In it, Steiner finds ten reasons why thinking makes you sad. Among other things, because the infinity of thinking collides with the finiteness of existence. And because there is no conclusive answer to questions such as the origin of the cosmos, the “meaning and purpose” of our life. Because the “disinterested pursuit of truth” is “another motive for sorrow”, because the result of thought is often not followed by action, because thought can “make us strangers to one another”, because there is a mismatch between “great thought, great creativity and the ideals of social justice”. And yet, according to George Steiner, thinking is a “guarantor of freedom,” a freedom that the “thoughtful” also claims for themselves.
Steiner wrote his thoughts on thinking long after Sabina Grzimek created the sculpture, which also stands for a timeless universality. The sculptress comes from a family of artists. She was born in Rome in 1942, the eldest child of the sculptor Waldemar Grzimek and the painter and ceramist Christa von Carnap. The parents divorced in 1951, two years later the mother married the sculptor Fritz Cremer and moved with the family to Berlin-Pankow. Sabina Grzimek’s father lived in West Berlin after the Wall was built in 1961. Her love for art had long since been awakened. From 1961 to 1962 Sabina Grzimek completed a practical year at the porcelain manufactory in Meissen, then studied sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee until 1967, was a master student with Fritz Cremer from 1969 to 1972, and then worked again as a freelance sculptor, painter and graphic artist. Many of her sculptural works are in public space, above all, but not only, in Berlin. She has received several awards, such as the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 1983, the Ernst Rietschel Prize from the city of Pulsnitz in 1996 and the Brandenburg Art Prize in 2011. Her works have been and are often exhibited, especially in Germany, but also internationally. In 1978 the Karl-Marx-Städter Galerie Oben showed works by the artist, in 1981 the Neruda Club.
figures in the making
Sabina Grzimek mainly works figuratively, without succumbing to flat realism. Her characters are in the making, have become, always have a development behind them and ahead of them. The “Sinnende” in Chemnitz is a beautiful example of the creative and expressiveness of figurative art. What the art historian Peter Freitag wrote about Grzimek’s graphics also applies to her sculptures: “At the constant point of life’s activities, a searching self recognizes itself again and again.” Or, as Fritz Cremer said of her work in 1979: “To begin with, Sabina Grzimek is literally concerned with the core of things, with the core of sculptural, plastic being, (…) Sometimes, even in Sabina Grzimek’s work, I am frightened, a fear of being palpable, which expresses lamenting a hurt life. For me, however, this lamentation only occurs indirectly, as a simultaneous concern, so to speak, as a challenge to the viewer to protect it.” Or just the thinking that makes you sad to endure.