Ewald Mataré

Ewald Mataré is one of the most important German sculptors of the 20th century. The artist became widely known after 1945 for his monumental works for religious buildings, such as the bronze doors for the south transept portal of Cologne Cathedral (1947/48) or the bronze door (1956-58) for Salzburg Cathedral. One of the main concerns of his work is the capture of animals, whereby he takes the observation of nature as his starting point, but seeks to reduce the sculptural design to the essentials of form, right down to the symbolic. The sculptor was particularly fascinated by the cow: "this animal is completely without thought, completely sentient," he wrote in his diary, "and thus it rises up great and pure, we are dualistic in eternal back and forth with our intellect and our sensations." Mataré repeatedly creates pictorial works of cows in order to "slowly approach this beast from all sides": "perhaps I will succeed in encircling it after all". Mataré's cows became increasingly abstract and symbolic, culminating in sculptures such as "Mathematik Kuh I" (1946, WV 316) and "Zeichen einer Kuh" (1948, WV 338a). With "Receding cow with closed horns", Mataré slightly reduces the degree of abstraction, giving the animal partly rounded parts, but he remains with a geometrically orientated design of its physiognomy. Nevertheless, the sculptor impressively succeeds in capturing the animal's characteristic stiffness in its backward movement, its deliberate and endearing nature. Anette Brunner