quartier

Whoooam! A roar fills the soccer stadium. Hans has started up the chainsaw. The spectators waiting in the Grünwalder Stadium for the beginning of an idiosyncratic opera about Karl Valentin cover their ears. Hans Panschar, the sculptor, had been commissioned to "compose" the overture for this opera. So he started up his gasoline-powered tool, which is to him what the palette knife is to Bob Ross ("The Joy of Painting") or the chisel is to Michelangelo ("David"). Within a few minutes, Hans conjures up a man-sized wooden spoon from the raw tree trunk amid the noise of his brute tool. The thing "spoon", however, is a poetic portrait of the man Valentin. After all, the completely impoverished national poet Karl Valentin had tried in vain at the end of his life to exchange a wooden spoon he had carved himself for a roll at the bakery.

Hans Panschar has also turned bread rolls into works of art. When he was "Artist in Residence" at Munich's "Art Bakery" in 2010, he used flamethrowers to preserve them into a dark sculpture. And when he recognized a fish head in the random shapes of the bread dough, he cunningly added a wooden fish body to these fish-headed rolls and hung this work of dough and wood on the gallery wall as a "fish roll." The audience immediately understood - as it often happens with Hans Panschar -: the vernissage guests wanted to buy the valentinesque small sculptures by the dozen. Many artists would have started serial production at this point. Hans, on the other hand, who has retained a healthy skepticism against too quick an effect, immediately declared these objects to be "actually unsaleable."

These were the anecdotes, there is, of course, to them a work that remains: For loudly carved spoons and perishable rolls are not the "big" themes of the sculptor Hans Panschar, who likes to work long on a few simple forms. When he creates abstract forms - which he likes to do - he does not shape the tree trunk into something it never was, but often (watch out for the chainsaw!) creates an empty form in the wood. What then becomes sculpture is what is no longer there: a hole, a view through, a cave for art in the middle of the grown wood.

The happy grin, the typical characteristic of the average viewer of a Panschar sculpture, is usually ignited by his figurative works. Hans sticks to his guns: he says he refuses to depict the human figure on principle. He prefers to depict what man has formed. Here the artist is mistaken: for just as a spoon becomes a portrait of Karl Valentine for him, so every object that Hans Panschar coaxes from the wood has a life of its own. That means: Panschar limits himself in his work to objects that man has built to survive in the hostile world or to make himself "at home" in it ... Hans likes to carve things that only indirectly show that there is a human being: Hans makes houses, books, boats and again and again chairs. Whereby, however, the houses, books, boats and especially the chairs of Hans Panschar always seem so alive, as if they were individuals, as if they would hold still only for a moment for the person who is looking at them.

Especially the seemingly so simple, archaic form of the chair Hans Panschar elicits whole pandemonies of the human character. Yes, the chairs of Hans Panschar can laugh, walk and also suffer with their four legs, the seat and the backrest: "Crucifixion" is then also the name of the work with which the sculptor Panschar has approached the human figure as never before. Panschar's "Crucifixion" consists not of a crucifix, but of course of a chair. It hangs pitifully and limply from the wall and has obviously just taken all the suffering in the world upon itself.

Dr. Andreas Ammer