France Vs Germany, the garden gnome, a point of contention.

Ottmar Hörl creates and presents works whose style is quite particular: his sculptures and statuettes, all monochrome, are not unique, but reproduced in series (on request, they can be signed) and installed in museums around the world, but also parks, gardens, or cities...
Ottmar Hörl creates and stages through large format happenings!
In 2004, he made 10,000 owls in the unique colors of the Olympic rings, and installed them in the form of a giant square in a stadium of nearly 4,000 m2, the work having been dedicated to the Olympic Games in Athens (The work is entitled: “Carrying Owls to Athens”).
Once again in 2016, with the installation of hundreds of snail statuettes in the city center of Essenheim (Name of work; “Avant-garde Snail”).
In 2010, nearly 800 sculptures of Luther were installed in the city of Wittenberg, a city where, moreover, the reforming ideas of the artists took shape.
2015, 2000 statuettes of lions, (emblem of Bavaria), are installed randomly within the city of Munich (Name of the work “Bavarian Lion”).
And he will do a lot after in the following years...

Then, focusing on these characters, the artist launched nine years later, a new work called "Rolling Change", where a thousand dwarfs this time blue, are stored everywhere in the city of Seligenstadt (bus stops, public gardens etc ...) . They did not stay there long, since in less than twenty-four hours, all the dwarves had been stolen.. Or rather moved to private gardens, or on low tables as ornaments. The hidden objective of the artist was indeed to artistically demonstrate the transfer of public space to private space!

Other types of dwarves were born by the hand of Ottmar Hörl, each dwarf being reproduced in numerous copies, and each expressing a very particular message. Among the variations, it is possible to find the following works by the artist: in a position of prayer (Work called (“Ben”), then with an outstretched hand to apparently greet (Work “Welcome”), or the typical blind -deaf or mute (Work “Geheimnisträger Nichts Sehen, Nichts Hören, Nichts Sagen”), and to conclude, the one with V-finger (Work “Victory”), a sensitive work because the elf imitates the Nazi salute, in order to mocking the concept of the superiority of the white race (work “Dance with the Devil”).

France Vs Germany, the garden gnome, a point of contention.
These decorative objects are the subject of a real fascination for some, while for others, it is the perfect symbol of bad taste.
The artist Ottmar Hörl sees it as a real popular symbol and he sets his sights on it from the beginning of the 80s.
This is a real phenomenon, a sort of artistic comet among garden gnomes: the Sponti garden gnome, the activist garden gnome, gnome giving the middle finger. I
It was born about ten years ago, when the artist was seized with a pressing desire for provocation.
A humorous provocation that incites mischievous disobedience... and everywhere around the planet.
Better still, Ottmar Hörl decided to “follow the adventures” of Ponti across the planet through his site.
It encourages and offers Internet users with a Sponti to describe what it does, among other things, if it goes on vacation, if it plays pétanque, or if it visits new gardens.
Or when artistic humor takes over.

All garden gnomes by Ottmar Hörl are HERE