IMAGES - ENCOUNTERS Dear reader, join me! Accompany me on a stroll through ideas and images. Stroll with me through my hometown. Together with my family, my friends and my company, Ottobock, I have always felt in the best hands in the mature cultural landscape that is the Eichsfeld and hope you will feel the same. Our little tour begins at the Hotel zum Löwen in the heart of historical Duderstadt. Everything we will see on these pages is within one hundred meters from its doors. I selected the Hotel zum Löwen as our starting point because it is a house with a long history and an inviting atmosphere. I feel at home here. And I find it important to surround myself with the things most important to me. Those are, for one, witnesses to history, from historical timber-frame architecture, or fachwerk, to archeological relics, which you can see in the small exhibition in the hotel. I also surround myself with contemporary art, which I have been passionately collecting for over two decades. Art has truly gripped me - though the draw was initially subtle. The collection mirrors my development. Important works in my collection come from strong artistic personalities, such as Neo Rauch, Helmut Newton, Thomas Ruff and Götz Diergarten. Photography has become a particularly meaningful stimulus to me over the years. As businessman, collector and patron I tend to think not only globally; I also want to bring great art to our region. I take interest - in the sense of a societal obligation - in the work of my employees as I do in "my" artists. Their work is so important to me that I want to be able to present it to a wider audience. That desire has driven me to create various new venues, for instance the Kunsthalle HGN here in Duderstadt or the Atelierhaus at Bötzow Berlin on the grounds of the historical Bötzow Brewery. The Hotel zum Löwen is now the most recent among these, a place where art - above all photography - can be experienced. Pop Art star Andy Warhol is a permanent guest at the Löwen; his Polaroid portraits depict the beautiful and wealthy of the 1970s and 1980s. The reticent stars of photography, in contrast, are Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have eternalized a piece of cultural history in their insistent documentation of industrial structures and have simultaneously created significant conceptual art. I recognize my own feelings in Bernd Becher's sense of home, reflected in his earliest photographs of the Siegerländer Fachwerkhäuser (Siegerland Timber-Frame Houses) in the mining region where he grew up. The Bechers' typology of timber-frame houses reminds me of my own hometown, Duderstadt, which has been irrevocably shaped by the seamless architectural landscape of over five hundred timber-frame buildings. To that end I wanted to make a statement by making the historical fachwerk architecture an artistic theme. Upon the occasion of the reopening of the remodeled Hotel zum Löwen, I invited artist Götz Diergarten to capture his perspective of our town in photographs. The work of Diergarten, whose visual language was shaped by his studies under Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has come to hold a very special place in my collection, which includes works from nearly every one of the artist's series. The facades and typographies from Germany, the French-Belgian beach huts in Gouville and Knokke, the functional architecture of English seasides and the stark colors and graphically geometric views of European subways stations of METROpolis manifest his concept: that shapes and colors from our everyday surroundings can be discovered anew in a photographic image. He opens our eyes to the beauty of reality, gives us the opportunity to see things we have seen a thousand times from a new and different perspective. The painterly and abstract can reside in even the seemingly simple or banal. With his fresh and discriminating eye for beauty, Götz Diergarten has in his photographs distilled the beauty of my hometown into a single aesthetic vision. He is among the most illustrious of company. Like another Becher student, Thomas Struth, who created photographs in 1991 for a private Swiss clinic, Diergarten finds figurative formulations anchored in recognition yet void of any traces of the familiar. The abstractions never withdraw to become inaccessible. Diergarten represents a contemporary generation of photographers who have found their individual artistic expressions in documentary. Observe with me through Diergarten's camera lens the ever-changing tonal nuances of the timber-frame house facades. Notice the mostly darkly accented beam constructions in front of the delicately or boldly hued fan, a prime example of opulent facade ornamentation. Join me in gazing at the half-circle fan rosettes on Apothekenstraße; see on Haberstraße the differently colored stepped beams, or the sheer diversity of the adorned bands of carved wood on Hinterstraße. A whole host of associations will strike the viewer as he or she strolls through the pages of this little book (or through the streets and lanes of the historical city). Is that not a flag, a letter, a cross symbol in the narrowly framed image? And then there are the blossoms, tendrils and fruits, capitals and small figures' heads that exquisitely come to the fore. I myself continue to marvel at the many revealing details I encounter anew in Diergarten's photographs. And yet the abstract panels of color are also soothing. Diergarten himself once said that he was concerned with "a certain school of seeing, with slowing down and becoming attuned to perception through the things that always surround us." He has here perfectly achieved his own ideals. In the guestrooms and other public areas of the Hotel zum Löwen, guests can experience these impressive images for themselves. Finally, the artist offers us yet another visual reading of Duderstadt's resplendent architecture. He has collected old postcards of city views from earlier eras. Most were indeed mailed - from the Hotel zum Löwen in part! - spreading the picturesque image of the town throughout the world. From this vantage point, we can now shift from the overview to the lovingly preserved architectural details and back again, from the whole to the framed detail. I hope you enjoy browsing, discovering, marveling. Sincerely, Your Hans Georg Näderweiterlesen