Hörl Ottmar

Ottmar Hörl, born in 1950 in Nauheim, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Wertheim.His work in the shape of a purple chicken is omnipresent at Bad Ragartz 2024 in both large and small formats. Their beauty, laying performance and meat are so sought-after that chickens are kept as farm animals all over the world. The domesticated animal once spread from Asia to Europe. A chicken doesn't need much. And so man has degraded this species into a successful, efficient "turbo chicken" and economic product. Today, according to Focus magazine, around 23 billion chickens worldwide lay approximately 1.2 trillion eggs per year and chicken meat consumption is over 100 million tonnes. For the Swiss Triennial of Sculpture in Bad Ragaz, conceptual artist Ottmar Hörl is now realising a large-scale chicken sculpture. The motif was already the subject of his 2007 installation "The chicken that lays golden eggs should not be slaughtered". The phrase refers to Jean de La Fontaine's famous fable in which a man kills his hen, which lays a golden egg for him every day, out of greed in order to get his hands on the supposed treasure. The larger-than-life format and the decision to use the unusual colour purple symbolise the shift towards an emotionally distanced view of humanity's treatment of living creatures based on pragmatic, industrial intensive farming. With his serial, purple-coloured work of art, Ottmar Hörl thus creates a monument to the chicken as a representative of all farm animals.

 Quote

 «An artistic intention that remains an artistic intention has failed. It can only be interesting if it stands as a model for a life context in which each individual stands.»