Bruno Feger

The monumental blossoms and plants made of steel, wax and resin, which Bruno Feger removes from their actual purpose and familiar form and places in public space and nature, appear imposing, almost fantastic. Isolated as a single plant or brought together in groups, they naturally rise up to the sky here and there like steel. Thus, for example, our gaze follows a steel tube several meters long that rises vertically into the sky in a curved form and yet is completely static. At its tip, two oval-shaped steel blades composed of small material plates unfold. The welds are still clearly visible. The individual particles previously removed from a large steel plate are thus joined together to form a new shape.

In the starting point of Bruno Feger’s art almost always seems to be the attempt to put object and sign in a relationship to each other, to connect them with each other but also to exchange them against each other.
He creates his flowers and other plants as ideal images, imperishable as a snapshot in their most beautiful state of growth, recognizable by the viewer even in their abstracted form and color. The symbolic power of the plants themselves, but also that of their color (often the rich red, blue or green) seems to unfold their meaning directly for the viewer:
The healing power of the rosehip, the rich red of the tulips, signaling passion and fertility as well as danger. Or the grass, which is often little noticed in nature by the wayside or under our feet, but here, isolated as a single object, gains the viewer’s full attention and whose color stands equally for hope and growth.
It is the contrasts and contrasts in form and content that make Bruno Feger’s sculptures speak. Transience is brought to a standstill, naturalness is displaced by artificiality, proportions are suspended, the real is elevated to the ideal, reality and realness are questioned. The positioning of the sculptures, which are actually rigid, also initiates movement and opens up a dialogue with the space surrounding them.
Through this idealizing and contrasting mode of representation, as well as their oversized size, the sculptures become striking signs in public space, in the midst of nature, after whose model they were created and in the midst of which they now create a field of tension as contoverses, reformulating the perception of things and at the same time raising existential questions.
In a similar way as Bruno Feger’s plants are taken from their natural destination and isolated in order to function as signs, words or whole parts of sentences are also deliberately removed from their respective linguistic or literary context and placed freely in space as sculptural steel objects. The meaning of the words is usually difficult to decipher, while they play an elementary role in the process of creation, the transformation process from sign to object.
Bruno Feger also experiments here with the relationship between object and meaning. Here it is images that do not immediately evoke an association in us, although in their initial form they are supported solely by their content meaning.
We have to get completely involved in perceiving the forms, the cast of shadows, the movement and the material, without being able to concretize a content-related thought right away.
The artist himself describes the effect of his steel words with the following sentence:
“This veiling of dissimilarity with things, which in turn makes things real.”
Unlike the steel flowers, grasses and plants, here the sign itself is brought to tangible form, the language transformed into a three-dimensional structure, which in this way reaches entirely new levels of meaning.

Bankengruppe, Frankfurt
Sammlung Hoimar von Ditfurth, Bad Homburg
Sammlung Rainer Wild, Heidelberg
Sammlung Edith Ulmer, Frankfurt
Sammlung Christoph Neizert, Marköbel
Sammlung Museum und Galerie im Prediger, Schwäbisch Gmünd
Sammlung Baeck-Strohschein, Bad Homburg
J.W.Goethe Universität, Frankfurt