YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU MEET AN ANGEL by Dr. Barbara Aust-Wegemund We are delighted that Dr. Barbara Aust-Wegemund has contributed another article to Family Office Elite Magazine. We have often heard about being kind to everyone because you never know when you might be meeting an angel. This may happen to you, when you get in touch with the Edith Breckwoldt’s sculptures. On the 4th August 2015, we celebrated the 78th birthday of one of the most iconic, controversial, and astonishingly multilevel artists: Edith Breckwoldt (19372013). “When Edith was talking to you she’d always be feeling something,” says Frank Breckwoldt, her strongest fan, husband and muse. “The way she has been touching a stone, a flower, a tree, rubbing it with the palm of her hand, spreading out her fingers. She was intensely tactile, and that fed into her work, her feel for stone, wood, bronze – and to human relations.” In most art exhibitions, you read the instruction “Do not touch”. But Edith Breckwoldt labeled her works with “Please Touch”, to get in touch with the sculpture and surprise the visitors with their hidden emotions. Inner peace, symbiosis and vitality are the words that come to mind with Edith Breckwoldt. Her sculptures embody the great themes that she explored throughout her career; the ambiguities of human relationships. Using semi-abstract forms of human figures, she employed their shapes as vehicles to convey emotions. Edith Breckwoldt continually extended her sculptural ideas using first naturalistic, later abstract imagery, while exploring the possibilities of her chosen medium - plaster cast in bronze. She denied any influence by her teacher, the Edwin Scharff alumnus Fritz Fleer, but developed her own artistic identity focused on an impulsive, creative working process.
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Sculptor enthusiasts should visit the glorious (secret) sculpture garden in Hamburg Schloß Hohenlinden to absorb not only her art but that serene spirit. Many of her collectors are aware that there is a light shining side to this extraordinary artist, who was born 1937 in Lauenburg and died 2013 in Hamburg.
Edith Breckwoldt’s studio was based in her home in Hamburg, Schloß Hohenlinden with its gardens open to the sky and the elements. But it is surrounded by thick granite walls, so she could keep her privacy if she wanted and benefited of