heads

profil*new*rose
wooden heads

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heads

busts represent models: cast in bronze or hewn in stone, they rest heavily on pedestals, a gallery of profiles – generations juxtaposed. the sculptor franz betz puts his roughly sketched heads up there with the rest. with no concrete model but in living wood, they stand for ambiguity and round off their own finite life cycle.
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in his works made of wood, what franz betz wants most of all is to experiment with forms. they are sketched with a chainsaw and develop in a dynamic process: coloured steles sprout from old construction wood – freshly felled wood is turned into sculptures and left to mature naturally. belonging to the “c, k and r” series, they are often top-heavy, heads tilted to one side, thinking. this is what the new “o” series refers to.
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slices of tree trunk turn into jagged busts. angular heads with circling grain, rotated and standing upright, seen in elevation and in profile: the hardwood robinia sets the pace, unpredictable and always surprising. fissures run to the centre, circling around an inward eye. breathing water and bleached by the sun, the wood completes its life cycle, from yellow green to golden brown and then to a silvery grey patina.