Penguin head down sculpture by Ottmar Hörl - Penguin head down

Artist: Ottmar Hörl

Two hundred penguins grouped together in a room at Untergröningen Castle. As part of the 7th Summer of Art and Culture in 2007, themed "The Animal Exposed: Animal Coexistences," Ottmar Hörl chose the emperor penguin. "I am fascinated by the emperor penguin's brooding behavior in the middle of the inhospitable Antarctic winter. For an entire colony of penguins, only a few well-defined parameters and rules of the game guarantee the survival of the chicks, the adult birds, or the carried egg for nine months. They live in a system that allows for no reprieve. Their coexistence reflects them back to themselves. In the Antarctic, there is no coexistence: there is only white and black. And the penguins live most of the time in a landscape saturated with white."

The design

Ottmar Hörl, a multidisciplinary German artist, is internationally recognized for his avant-garde style and his boldness in undertaking colossal projects. Sculptures, series of sculptural installations, photographs, and conceptual objects: his goal is to propose a type of art accessible to everyone, notably by democratizing sculpture through the display of gigantic and radical projects in public spaces. Today, it is his garden gnome Ben, presented in Cologne for the first time in 2005, that contributes to his great fame: his installations are regularly exhibited in European capitals. Passionate about the democratization of art, he uses simple materials like PVC. Highly invested in the world of Fine Arts, he was one of the founding members of the Nuremberg Academy in 1999, of which he became president in 2005. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his great creativity and his radical, offensive vision of promoting the democratization of sculpture. He is also a founding member of the Fomalhaut group in 1985: a design, art, and architecture studio where he contributed to the design, in collaboration with architects, of impressive design pieces such as Living Room: a contemporary residence in the medieval center of Gelnhausen in Germany.