Land Art

Blessed are the peacemakers: sculpture on Lake Wolayersee

Sculptor Georg Planer 2023 with the huge, naturally broken-off boulder that he spent months carving into a symbol of peace.(Bild: Hannes Wallner)

Wolayersee: Hannes Wallner has brought it into focus for his BergKrone. But it is precisely in cultural terms that Georg Planer's huge sculpture reveals universal urgency.

At some point, it broke out of the east face of the Seekopf - the 650-ton block of limestone that the Carinthian sculptor with East Tyrolean origins has polished into a silent monument. Planer also needs few words for the haunting inscription that seals the place in the Carnic Alps, which was hotly contested during the First World War, with contemporary relevance and universal longing: "Blessed are the peacemakers".

Planer's peace stone on the Kugy Alpine Trail near Lake Wolayersee(Bild: Hannes Wallner)

Planer and Elke Maier have been creating meaning in the context of Land Art, which uses artistic means to create awareness and take responsibility for what has grown historically and naturally in Millstatt for decades. Here, both the monastery garden and the studio, with and without the traditional "Kunstblütefest", reveal a content-based, work-immanent claim "to set signs and lay trails to the silent witnesses of past cultures and events that visibly and invisibly shape the place and draw the present from the depths of historical contexts." The past of the mountain war (from 1915 to 1918) is still tangible at Wolayersee for those who know what they are looking for.

Georg Planer used the stone to create a peace memorial at Wolayersee.(Bild: Hannes Wallner)

As part of the Julius Kugy Alpine Trail, Planer's monument in the border region between Italy and Austria also dispenses with obvious design in order to lead from war to peace to international understanding, in keeping with the motto. Like the war-ravaged landscape, the stone is also marked by sharp-edged cuts, "wounds" that heal with a velvety smoothness - so that many hands of many cultures may touch them in order to be touched. The inauguration ceremony is on June 29 (11 am). Registration by June 25: 0664/50 40 950.