Sculpture-Inauguration
Andreas Felgers Praise of God, 2025

Sculpture park
Rehabilitation Hospital Bad Sebastiansweiler

A recent ceremony attended by the 90-year-old artist marked the inauguration of a new three-part sculpture in Bad Sebastiansweiler. Ernst Wilhelm Gohl, who grew up in Mössingen (and Esslingen-Sulzgries) and has been Regional Bishop of the Protestant Church in Württemberg since 2022, gave the welcoming address under a bright blue sky.

The colour of the sky provided the ideal backdrop for the triad of colours in the steel steles, which, highly abstracted, resemble human figures with raised arms. This compositional form was last seen in Andreas Felger’s paintings, where it referred to the human body and was open to interpretation as to whether the arms were to be read as a gestural cry for help or as a kind of worship. In the sculpture group entitled Praise of God, however, this form appears to have taken a clearly positive turn. The raised “arms” allow the steles, which are already larger than life, to reach a little further upwards, thus mediating between the earthly and heavenly worlds. Even with its extreme formal reduction, the work functions as a sign of man’s relationship to a dimension that will always remain unattainable.