Controversial artist

Mostviertel rebel persistently goes his own way

Principles: Artist Miguel Horn refuses to bend.

(Bild: Antal Imre)

Unbending, anti-war, courageous, rousing - the 76-year-old artist Miguel Horn combines all these noble attributes. The Weinviertel native sometimes causes offense with his works. But that doesn't bother the cultural rebel much.

His themes are unpleasant, his visual language often disturbing, downright brutal," say critics with a mixture of admiration and respect for the work of the Mostviertel sculptor Miguel Horn. The artist does indeed know how to provoke with a certain tenacity. And not only in his home town of Neuhofen an der Ybbs.

Worldwide exhibitions of a "vagabond"
But in many different ways: for example, with a shrine to Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer who was executed in a show trial for speaking out against an oil company. Miguel Horn, whose artistic vagabondage took him to Chile, New York and Paris, was also courageous enough to cause offense elsewhere. For example, with an exhibition in Blindenmarkt, which shone a harsh light on the horrors of war and the abysses of human nature - so relentlessly that the show was boycotted by the local comradeship association and even had to be aborted due to the storm of protest that ensued.

Wood "too soft" for the subject of war
The brutality of the crucifixion, in turn, is thematized with a larger-than-life Christ made of metal. The fact that he chose a different raw material after his preferred material, wood, is due to the images from the Gulf War. However, visiting Horn also means immersing yourself in a fantastic world of Roman Guardians and the "Place of Forgotten Peoples", which takes a critical look at the annihilation of indigenous peoples.