Anton Thuswaldner (1929–2021)
"Y"
Born 1929 in Klagenfurt. Lived and worked in Kaprun.
1944 Sculpture school for wood and stone in Hallein. After the dissolution of the company, apprenticeship at Jakob Adlhart’s. 1951 to 1953 Attends the Fritz Behn Public School, Ehrwald, previously Hallein Federal Trade School. From 1955, surveyor at the Tauernkraftwerke power plants in Kaprun.
Thuswaldner was the provocateur among Salzburg's sculptors and object artists.
"Y" | Gneiss | 2007
Encrypted number systems are always present in Anton Thuswaldner's work.
The Y as the 25th letter of the alphabet symbolises man as a form and metaphor and characterises in many variations the formal appearance of the works of the artist, who works mainly with serpentine and granite. This sculpture, made of gneiss, holds a sculptural challenge. However, the inner fracture line resulting from quarrying and the associated danger of breaking apart during the working process also contains the artist's intended theme of the "broken man". Through the metal pin, the heavy granite feels its way into the space, almost floating, and unfolds its spatial presence and power in a freestanding manner.
The surface is characterised by the contrast between the worked and the raw stone surface, in addition to the worked-in numerical design. In terms of the "figura serpentinata", distinctive in painting and especially in Mannerist sculpture, Thuswaldner creates a sinuous movement around the sculpture in the stone, although this does not result from the rotation of the figure but from the arrangement of the surfaces in relation to each other. The viewer moves around the sculpture and makes it tangible in its overall view. This corresponds to the duality of life in the sense of the "ambivalence of being" formulated in Goethe's Faust.
